Egypt’s constitution identifies Islam as the state religion and the principles of Shari’a as the primary source of legislation. While Article 64 states that “freedom of belief is absolute,” only Muslims, Christians, and Jews can practice their religion publicly and build places of worship. Of the country’s estimated 104 million people, around 90 percent are Sunni Muslims, and non-Sunni Muslims, such as Shi’a Muslims, comprise less than 1 percent. An estimated 10 percent are Christians, the majority of whom belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church; other Christians belong to various denominations that include Catholic, Anglican, Evangelical Protestant, Maronite, Armenian Apostolic, Greek and Syrian Orthodox, and others. There are at least 2,000 Baha’is, approximately 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and fewer than 20 Jews. Legal and Security Repression Egypt’s evolving crackdown on civil society demonstrated the overlapping interests of religious freedom and broader human rights. In November, security forces detained Mohamed Basheer, Karim Ennarah, and Gasser Abdelrazek, three members of the NGO the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). While authorities released them three days later, after an international outcry, prosecutors submitted their case to a terrorism court, which ordered the seizure of their personal assets. These arrests were likely in retaliation for EIPR’s discussion of issues facing Egyptian civil society with a visiting delegation of diplomats from the European Union and Canada in October, echoing Coptic activist Ramy Kamel’s November 2019 arrest and indefinite detention one day before he was expected to travel to Switzerland to testify at the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues. Both EIPR and Kamel have devoted significant emphasis in their advocacy to the challenges facing Coptic Christians and other religious minorities in Egypt. Their detentions, along with that of EIPR researcher Patrick Zaki earlier in the year, demonstrate a systematic and ongoing effort by the government to suppress any challenge to its narrative of progress and its efforts to bolster its international image—even against those whose work addresses the same challenges the government itself ostensibly recognizes. At the same time, a recent USCIRF report has shown that implementation of Egypt’s blasphemy law—Article 98(f) of the Criminal Code—made it one of the world’s worst offenders of both blasphemy-related prosecutions and societal violence between 2014 and 2018. Such arrests and prosecutions continued in 2020; they involved both Muslims and non-Muslims, but they most often targeted religious minorities, including Christians, nonbelievers, Qur’anists, and Shi’a Muslims. For example, in June an Alexandria court sentenced Anas Hassan to three years in prison for managing a Facebook page that promoted atheism, while Reda Abdel Rahman, a teacher at al-Azhar Institute in Sharqiya governorate, was detained in August for promoting Qur’anism. Rural Sectarianism Anti-Christian mob attacks remain endemic in parts of rural Egypt. Although 2020 saw a modest decline in incidents in comparison to prior years, the decrease may have resulted from the months-long closures of houses of worship throughout Egypt to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Nevertheless, legal impunity for the perpetrators of such violence persisted in 2020 as the systematic norm. These sorts of attacks most commonly occur in response to a rumor of a perceived slight against the Muslim majority—such as an interreligious affair, a social media post perceived as insulting Islam, or an attempt to register an informal church legally—and they are almost always met with the convening of a “customary reconciliation council” that ultimately absolves the perpetrators of legal responsibility and punishes the victims. For example, in September the Minya Criminal Court convicted 23 defendants in absentia for burning several Coptic homes in 2016 following rumors of an interreligious affair—a rare prosecution, likely due to the notoriety of the attack, which also involved the sexual assault of an elderly Coptic woman—but the terms of a last-minute reconciliation agreement led to the acquittal of three of the attackers. Key U.S. Policy Bilateral relations between the United States and Egypt remained steady in 2020 —a partnership that has weathered countless challenges since the Camp David Accords of 1979. U.S. financial assistance, mostly in the form of FMF, remained largely consistent at $1.38 billion in FY 2020, and the same amount is expected for FY 2021. The administration of President Donald J. Trump broadly supported President El-Sisi’s efforts to counter radical Islamist violence and to improve religious freedom conditions in Egypt. In October, then U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Acting Administrator John Barsa, then Deputy Assistant to the President Sarah Makin, and then Chief Advisor for International Religious Freedom Samah Norquist led a delegation to the country that included a rare visit by high-ranking U.S. officials to Upper Egypt, where they joined U.S. Ambassador Jonathan Cohen in meeting with local programs to promote religious freedom in sectarianism-plagued Minya. However, Egypt’s detention of EIPR staff members in November drew sharp, bipartisan rebuke from members of Congress and the State Department—only weeks after 55 members of Congress issued a letter calling on President El-Sisi to release imprisoned members of Egyptian civil society, naming Ramy Kamel and more than 20 others. U S C I R F – R E C O M M E N D E D F O R S P E C I A L W AT C H L I S T 67 EGYPT Background