"On June 4, an Egyptian criminal court sentenced 43 people to prison on charges of membership in illegal organizations. It was a familiar scenario for anyone who worked on human rights under Hosni Mubarak, when activists regularly criticized the roundup of hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members and their prosecution on the same charges. This time, however, the defendants were Egyptian and international staff of U.S. and German nongovernmental organizations. International law is clear on the issue: Membership in an unregistered organization should not in and of itself amount to a crime.
Yet the Egyptian presidency's latest draft of the new law governing NGOs would not prevent a repeat of the June 4 verdict. The presidency claims that the new draft law has no criminal penalties, yet this is misleading. The draft clearly states that the law's penalties would not supersede the harsher penalties inthe penal code. By this means, the draft law incorporates the vague language of the penal code criminalizing "membership in an illegal organization," allowing staff of these organizations to be charged with a crime for simply going into the office......"
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