Centre for Applied Human Rights
Helmy Elrawy
Egypt, CAHR, Spring 2012
My name is Helmy Elrawy, I’m an Egyptian human rights defender. I’m working on promoting financial transparency and accountability through monitoring the Egyptian budget from a rights perspective in my work as the Executive Director of the Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory (BAHRO).
Working on financial transparency and accountability, including corruption within the public domain, in a country with a long history under an authoritarian regime, is very risky. For instance, on 29 December 2011, a group of security forces broke into our office, the Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory, seizing all documents, PCs and laptops, even personal belongings, and arrested one of our colleagues. The case is still open, and could remain so for a long time, but we have to continue our work under this pressure and its vague results.
Now in York, I have had the opportunity to work on my own project, “Developing indicators to promote economic, social and cultural rights”. Rights indicator could help policy makers adopt policies promoting individual’s economic, social and cultural rights.