Last week, the Lowy Institute hosted a roundtable examining human rights in the Middle East, which featured human rights defender Hassan al-Amin and Tirana Hassan from Human Rights Watch. Hassan al-Amin fled Libya to be a dissident in exile and returned as an elected member of parliament investigating human rights abuses by anti-Gaddafi militia groups. Tirana is a senior researcher in the Emergencies Division at Human Rights Watch documenting abuses in Egypt and Syria.
Following the roundtable, Hassan al-Amin recorded a short podcast with the Lowy Institute's Middle East expert Anthony Bubalo. Hassan explained the political situation in Libya (0.13), and the mistakes made by the Libya's first Congress (1.09) and the West (3.30) following the revolution against Qadhafi.
We also recorded a short interview with Tirana Hassan, who talked about the arrest of Australian journalist Peter Greste in the context of a wider erosion of human rights in Egypt, following the 'second revolution' in 2013 (0.15). She also spoke about the nervousness among human rights activists: following the military crackdown on the media and opposition groups, they feel that they 'are next' (1.57). While noting the important role women's activist groups have played in Egypt (3.17), she laments that Egypt is 'certainly more oppressive now than it was under Mubarak's time' (4.52).