Neil Hicks

Egyptians will go to the polls tomorrow to vote in their first-ever competitive presidential election. The process may require a run-off vote next month, but whoever wins will have legitimacy in a contest in which tens of millions of voters will choose from a broad range of candidates. The new...

Beyond all the strange and often disturbing news coming out of Egypt, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that Egypt's second-ever contested presidential election will take place three weeks from now on May 23 and 24, with the possibility of a run-off on June 16 -...

The Obama administration is facing one of the biggest tests of its commitment to promoting democracy and human rights in the Arab world since the uprisings of the Arab Spring, over one year ago.

The administration must decide, pursuant to the 2012 appropriations law, whether the Secretary of State will...

Political parties with clear Islamic identities appear to be gaining a majority in preliminary results from Egypt's first round of parliamentary elections: the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Freedom and Justice Party has around 40% of the vote and a further 25% went to the more extreme Salafi, An-Nour party. While the Brotherhood...

When millions of Egyptians took to the streets in January and ousted their thirty-year president, they thought that they were taking a decisive step to move the country away from the military-backed dictatorship they had endured for the last 60 years. The terrible violence last Sunday that claimed...

President Obama approaches his third address to the United Nations General Assembly seemingly boxed in by the failure to make progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. While many will be waiting to see what the President will propose to reinvigorate the peace process, the Israeli-Palestinian issue should not divert attention...

Since I posted my last piece, written before the massive show of force by Islamist groups in Tahrir Square on July 29, several people have asked me if I would now like to reconsider my position.

It's a good...

In a ludicrously alarmist piece that appeared on the The Daily Beast, “Egypt’s Simmering Rage” Douglas Schoen and Randall Lane assert that "clearly and unambiguously" the political climate in Egypt is moving in a new direction that is "inimical to American and allied interests."

They make this stunning...

Tensions are building in Egypt as political uncertainties after the February 11 removal of the thirty-year president Hosni Mubarak - remain unresolved. As time marches on the contradictions and latent conflicts that comprise Egypt's post-uprising political scene become more urgent and impossible to ignore, but the way forward remains unclear....

In a speech earlier this week to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again exposed tensions at the core of the Obama administration's response to popular uprisings for human dignity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. These inconsistencies leave human rights and democracy activists in...

It's time for real change to start to take shape in Egypt.

Watch this video where I explain how that can happen, and what steps need to be taken:

Help Human Rights First ensure that there is an end to "Mubarakism" now that Mubarak himself is gone. Take action now....

Rapidly developing events across the broader Middle East and North Africa, with protesters calling for democracy and human rights and challenging authoritarian rulers from Morocco to Iran, are presenting testing policy challenges for the Obama administration in a region where many key strategic U.S. interests are at stake.

The administration...

As people throughout the Middle East and North Africa continue to demand their basic rights and freedoms in the face of repression from their governments, the U.S. government should lend support to their aspirations by articulating a consistent, principled message favoring respect for human rights and the spread of representative...

Mubarak has stepped down. But the question remains of whether this will change anything.

This is a critical moment for the U.S. government to make clear its intention to support the Egyptian people -- not the next despot.

President Obama should now make it clear that...

The tumultuous events in Tunisia last week have almost vanished from the newspapers as mass protests against the repressive rule of U.S. ally President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt have seized the headlines. The stakes for U.S. foreign policy are much greater in Egypt, a much larger, much more strategically important...

Over the weekend at the Community of Democracies conference in Krakow, Poland, Secretary of State Clinton made an important speech that set out in unambiguous terms the U.S. government's support for independent civil society. She noted that it -- together with representative government and a well-functioning market economy...

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Khaled Saeed, a 28-year old man, refused to show Egyptian police his ID in a random raid on an Internet cafe in Alexandria. In response, the police dragged him out into the street and beat him to death, in plain view of...

This week, one year after President Obama's "remarks to the Muslim world" delivered at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, Egypt has made little or no progress in political reform, human rights or democracy advancement. In fact, there has been retrenchment.

On May 11,...

It must be a strange feeling for many of the participants in the 2010 Washington Human Rights Summit to be coming to the capital of the United States where the government seems unable to decide whether upholding the rule of law and respecting human rights is a good...

Crossposted from Jurist

The leaders of the Islamic Republic know well the value of violence and brutality as political control mechanisms. In recent months, the authorities have unleashed random beating of protesters, arbitrary detention and torture, apparently including rape of detainees, running down protesters with motor vehicles, shooting...