Do we like Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Rights groups document a long pattern of jailing critics and prosecuting LGBTQ+ people and women under his rule, with only a few real acts of good beside it.
Sisi came up through the army and was defence minister when security forces cleared the Rab'a sit-in in Cairo in August 2013. Human Rights Watch documented at least 817 people killed, likely more than 1,000, and calls it a likely crime against humanity; it says nobody has been investigated or prosecuted. Sisi himself later defended the clearance on US TV, saying there were “thousands of armed people” there, which HRW disputes.
On prisoners, he told CBS in 2019: “I said there are no political prisoners in Egypt.” HRW answered that this conflicts with thousands of documented political arrests. Around COP27 in 2022, rights groups put the number at about 60,000, a figure Cairo denies, and Amnesty counted 1,540 arrests for speech and association in the lead-up.
The harm check is grim. After a rainbow flag was waved at a Cairo concert in 2017, HRW reported more than 85 arrests on “debauchery” charges, over 40 prison sentences and forced anal exams that HRW calls torture. HRW's 2026 report says a campaign of arrests of social media creators since mid-2025 mainly targeted women on morality charges. We found no words of his own on LGBTQ+ people, but all of this happened under his presidency.
On the planet, Egypt hosted COP27 in 2022 while Amnesty said the foreign ministry handpicked environmental groups that weren't critical of the government. Protests were confined to a monitored area away from the venue, and Alaa Abd el-Fattah's hunger strike became the face of the summit. Officials said the rules were meant to provide a peaceful environment for people to express their views.
The latest record doesn't improve. HRW's February 2026 report says the authorities have kept “a chokehold over the country this past year”, with 23 journalists jailed as of May, trials of about 6,000 people in terrorism cases and parliamentary elections held without genuine competition. In April he was on the diplomatic front, rejecting the displacement of Palestinians and urging the Gaza ceasefire's second phase to go ahead.
Now the good bit, because it's real. In September 2025 he pardoned Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a blogger who had spent most of 12 years in prison, and the UK thanked him for it. In 2015 he became the first Egyptian president to attend a Coptic Christmas mass and urged Egyptians to stay united, though one analyst saw political calculation in it.