Egypt's 'moral panic'

On Saturday, an HIV-positive Egyptian man will be unchained from his bed in a Cairo hospital to face prosecutors. He will be charged with the 'habitual practice of debauchery', a euphemism for homosexual conduct in Egyptian law. For the country's crackdown on gay men now applies a syllogistic fallacy: HIV/AIDS is evidence of homosexuality.

Amnesty International reports that the practice of apprehending HIV-positive individuals began in October 2007, when police intervened in an argument between two men on a street in central Cairo. When one of them informed the officers he was HIV-positive, police immediately took both men to the Morality Police office and opened an investigation against them for homosexual conduct.

The next part of the story is one of coercion and torture. Police allegedly demanded the names of the detainees' friends and sexual histories during interrogations.  The two men told lawyers that officers slapped and beat them for refusing to sign statements the police wrote for them. The men spent four days in the Morality Police office handcuffed to an iron desk, and were left to sleep on the floor. Police later subjected the two men to forensic anal examinations designed to 'prove' that they had engaged in homosexual conduct:

• Last week, Cairo police rounded up four more men suspected of having HIV, bringing the number of people arrested in its recent campaign to 12.
• Four have already been sentenced to a year in jail and eight are still in custody.
• Authorities forced the new detainees to undergo HIV testing without their consent. All those testing positive have been held in Cairo hospitals, chained to their beds.

Human Rights Watch claims the arrests are the products of homosexual intolerance and misunderstanding about HIV. It says the arrests not only violate the most basic rights of people living with HIV, but also threaten public health, by making it dangerous for anyone to seek information about HIV prevention or treatment.

Rough justice

The heavy-handed treatment meted out to HIV sufferers is typical of the entrapment and torture used in Egypt's brutal criminal justice system. Homosexuality is not de jure illegal in Egypt. However, in the early part of the 21st century, homosexuality became de facto illegal as various articles of the Egyptian Penal Code and other regulations of Egyptian Public Policy were invoked as the safeguards of public order and public morals.

A few hundred men have been arrested on suspicion of homosexual conduct in Egypt over the past few years, but it is thought that thousands of others have been harassed, arrested, often tortured, but not charged. On a broader level, Egypt's government is adept at manipulating moral panic, and sensationalising scandal in which groups are made the targets of popular fear and resentment. In the late 1990s, a series of such panics filled the press: Shias and teenage rock fans were decried as 'Satanists' and conspirators.

Gasser Abdel-Razek, Human Rights Watch's acting director of regional relations in the Middle East, has said that these cases show Egyptian police acting on the dangerous belief that HIV is not a condition to be treated, but a crime to be punished. Yet the police surveillance and entrapment of people based on their suspected homosexual conduct, forcible HIV tests, and physical abuse tell a larger story about Egypt's brutal criminal justice system, which accepts violence as investigation and stigma as certainty.