David Schenker is the Taube Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of the Linda and Tony Rubin Program on Arab Politics. He is the former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.
On July 3, Washington Institute fellow David Schenker presented a paper at an EU parliamentary conference titled “Briefing, Discussion, and Legal Implications of Religious Persecution.” The following is an excerpt; download the PDF to read the full paper.
Egypt has long been ruled by authoritarians, and for most of the past century, the state has been led by military men -- dictators in suits -- who have governed undemocratically. But the past two decades have been particularly repressive. Since 1993, in its annual assessment of political rights and civil liberties called "Freedom in the World," Freedom House has characterized Egypt as "not free." Within this context, freedom of religion has been an ongoing problem, especially for Egypt's non-Muslim minorities. Many had hoped that the 2011 revolution that ended Egypt's thirty-year-long Hosni Mubarak regime would mark a turning point in the nature of governance in Egypt. According to the US Department of State's latest International Religious Freedom report, however, nearly two years after Mubarak's departure, Cairo's "respect for religious freedom remained poor"...
