Political experts have criticized this week’s EU-Arab summit, which wrapped up Monday evening in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm al-Sheikh.
According to experts who spoke to Anadolu Agency, the wide attendance of European representatives at the summit betrayed the EU’s propensity for looking out for its interests at the expense of human rights.
Notably, the summit’s closing statement only briefly touched on the need to “respect all aspects of human rights and condemn of all forms of incitement, hatred and xenophobia”.
Egypt drew condemnation earlier this week when it executed nine young men convicted earlier for their alleged involvement in the 2015 assassination of a high-ranking Egyptian judicial official.
According to Amnesty International, the nine men were all convicted on terrorism charges after receiving “grossly unfair trials” marred by torture allegations.
The death sentences were carried out despite repeated calls by international rights groups for a stay of execution.
In a televised interview, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the raft of executions as a “crime against humanity”.
“Where is the West in this?” Erdogan asked, referring to the West’s muted reactions to the executions. “Do you hear the voice of the West?”
Nazir al-Kandouri, an Iraqi writer and researcher, says Europe doesn’t care about human rights — or the peaceful rotation of power — in Arab countries, “as long as the West’s interests are ensured”.
“Europe wants to keep these Arab regimes in place so they can stop illegal migration to Europe,” he said.
European leaders, al-Kandouri noted, were quick to attend this week’s summit in Sharm despite Egypt’s dismal human rights record.
“Even though the Egyptian regime just executed several young people on trumped-up charges, the summit failed to include human rights on its agenda,” he said.
He went on to accuse European leaders of “practicing political hypocrisy by applying blatantly double standards in terms of human rights”.
Al-Kandouri added: “Europe has always been hypocritical when it comes to the Middle East, where it prefers to invest in dictatorships at the expense of people’s rights.”
Ammar Qahf, director of Istanbul’s Omran Center for Strategic Studies, attributes Europe’s current embrace of the Arab world to what he described as Russia’s “geopolitical, economic and military superiority in the Middle East, especially in Syria”.
“EU countries hope to fill the vacuum created by the U.S. departure [from the region],” Qahf told Anadolu Agency.
“The EU also views these Arab states as a line of defense against migrant inflows and terrorism while ignoring the factual dynamics that lead to these crises,” he said.
Mustafa Hamedoglu, for his part, a Turkish political expert, believes such summits are a necessary means of promoting dialogue between Europe and the Arab world.
“This summit, however, was held amid a deteriorating rights situation in the Middle East and comes after a lengthy European absence from the region,” Hamedoglu told Anadolu Agency.
This week’s summit in Sharm, he added, “shows how badly the EU wants to play a more active role in the region — even at the expense of human rights”.
Hamidoglu also criticized the slogan — “Invest in stability” — under which this week’s summit was held.
Summit participants, the expert asserted, “should have examined the causes of this instability, like the lack of basic freedoms, the absence of free and fair elections and the chronic non-rotation of power”.
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