He is not yet 30, but already Hossam Bahgat has carved out a reputation as one of Egypt’s most prominent and effective human rights campaigners. As the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Bahgat has been a major driving force behind Egypt’s civil liberties movement: no easy feat in a country, which, according to Amnesty International, causes ‘long-standing concerns on systematic torture, deaths of prisoners in custody, unfair trials, arrests of prisoners of conscience for their political and religious beliefs or for their sexual orientation, wide use of administrative detention and long-term detention without trial and use of the death penalty’.
‘Things have been getting worse,’ says Bahgat, speaking from his Cairo home. ‘But we have had victories that keep us going, such as getting people out of jail and sending abusers to prison, and that is reason enough to be doing this kind of work.’
