Citing Gaza Help, Blinken Waives Human Rights Conditions on Aid to Egypt

Cairo will receive its full military aid allotment of $1.3 billion after the secretary of state also said it had made progress on releasing political prisoners and protecting Americans.

by Michael Crowley, nytimes.com

For the first time under the Biden administration, the United States will send Egypt its full allotment of $1.3 billion in annual military aid, waiving human rights requirements on the spending mainly in recognition of Cairo’s efforts to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, U.S. officials said.

The decision, which the State Department notified Congress of on Wednesday, marks a striking shift for the administration. President Biden came into office promising “no blank checks” that would enable Egypt’s rights abuses, and in each of the past three years, his administration had withheld at least some of the congressionally mandated aid to Cairo, a close American ally.

But the decision shows how the administration’s calculus has changed as Mr. Biden prioritizes trying to halt the violence in Gaza, one of the key goals he has set for himself in his final months in office.

In response to longtime concerns about human rights abuses in Egypt, U.S. law places conditions on about a quarter of the military aid to Egypt each year. To release it, the secretary of state must certify that Cairo has complied with a range of human rights requirements.

A State Department spokesman said the secretary, Antony J. Blinken, had found that Egypt had only partly met the human rights requirements but had overridden them, employing a legally permitted waiver “in the U.S. national security interest.”

Mr. Blinken’s decision was based on Egypt’s monthslong role as an intermediary between Hamas and Israel as the two sides try to negotiate a cease-fire deal that would free Israeli hostages in Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid into the territory, which borders Egypt’s Sinai Desert, the spokesman said.

It also reflected valuable Egyptian efforts to promote a cease-fire in neighboring Sudan’s civil war and its large-scale provision of aid to the Sudanese people, according to the spokesman.

But the full funding represents something of a free pass to Egypt’s authoritarian general-turned-president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The State Department’s latest annual country report on human rights found credible accounts in Egypt of arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, torture and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”

U.S. officials say they routinely press their Egyptian counterparts to make more progress on human rights.

But some human rights advocates wish American officials would do more to leverage the military aid allocated to Egypt each fiscal year, which under U.S. law is composed of three tranches.

The first, totaling $980 million, is subject to no conditions and granted automatically.

An additional $225 million is subject to a variety of human rights conditions — the ones that Mr. Blinken would not certify had been met but that he had waived on national security grounds.

A third, $95 million pot of money can be released only if the secretary of state finds that Egypt has made progress in the specific areas of releasing political prisoners, providing detainees with due process and “preventing the harassment and abuse of American citizens.” Mr. Blinken certified progress in these areas, the spokesman said.

As an example of that progress, the spokesman pointed to the release of more than 950 political prisoners over the past year, and an end to travel bans and foreign asset freezes implemented as part of a campaign of intimidation against foreign nongovernmental organizations. Egypt’s government has also advanced draft legislation to reform pretrial detention and make other changes to its draconian penal code.

Last year, Mr. Blinken declined to certify progress in those specific areas, withholding $85 million. In 2022 and 2021, he blocked $130 million of the aid, citing human rights abuses.