Writers in Sunday papers picked several political issues related to freedoms and democracy to comment on.
Gamal Zaida, in the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram, questioned the political integrity of a member of the state-funded National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) who had represented himself as a dissident from the Muslim Brotherhood and a friend of the current regime. According to Zaida, former leading member Kamal Al-Helbawy distanced himself from that past by resigning from the NCHR and appearing on channels hostile to Egypt to speak about his support for the Iranian project and Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Zaida wondered why the NCHR has not replaced him.
Al-Ahram’s Salah Montasser praised Parliament Speaker Ali Abdul Aal for ending the session without implementing his threat to expel opposition members from parliament. Montasser did not think highly of those members and considered them troublemakers, but he argued that expelling them would badly reflect on the speaker, who would be accused of intolerance and his action as non-democratic, regardless of the reasons.
Regarding the state’s fighting of fake news, Al-Youm Al-Sabaa’s Hazem Salah El-Din opinionated that rumours are produced by foreign elements and then spread on social media, targeting the Egyptian public with incorrect information and aiming at destabilising their trust in the political leadership.
Meanwhile, Al-Shorouk’s Editor-in-Chief Emad El-Din Hussein addressed the issue of unemployed journalists, which he said has been on the increase for various economic and political reasons, pushing newspapers to let off groups of journalists. To him, these journalists, in their quest to make a living, might easily be attracted by media outlets hostile to Egypt.
On a different note, Ikbal Baraka wrote for the privately-owned Al-Masry Al-Youm, demanding the protection of children’s rights from parental abuse, citing a recent case where a child was beaten to death, stating that Egypt should not be waiting for foreign entities to point out the issue in order to take a serious stance on the matter. The writer focused on the non-implementation of a final version of the childhood law.
