Human Rights Defenders at Risk

Maha

I work as a senior lawyer and the Director of the Economic and Social Rights programme in the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms.

I have carried out a lot of work in the field of  women’s rights and I am also the founder of the HON campaign at the Commission.

I also work on:

• The right to health.
• The right to education.
• Climate change.
• The right to housing. 

Important achievements

In my 20 years of human rights work, my most significant achievement regarding the community and legislative work was preventing female genital mutilation (FGM).

As a survivor myself, I dedicated much of my work to prevent the spread of this practice and to holding perpetrators accountable.

This included a series of campaigns and workshops in underdeveloped villages and neighborhoods in Egypt. My team and I organized workshops for women that provided mental health trainings, storytelling workshops on the harms of FGM, as well as a support networks to carry on the momentum we built.

These support networks would help us then identify doctors who performed these procedures and help us report them to local authorities. Years of this work gave me the opportunity to work with members of parliament on legislating anti-FGM and anti-harassment laws. We also held the same workshops for Syrian and Sudanese refugees in Cairo who either traveled with these practices from their home countries or were coerced into it as they assimilated into local communities.

Areas of work in the future

I will continue to work on files of cases of violence against women. More recently I have started working in the area of climate change, and exploring in particular how changes in the climate will economically and socially affect the lives of women.