The Egyptian state has usually looked upon civil society organizations as an appendage to the state, meant to fulfil developmental or even political functions as determined by the state. Whether providing social services, working on development programmes or advocating human rights, independent civil society organizations can present a danger to the order that successive political regimes seek to maintain. The Egyptian state worked to control organizations and their impact on society through laws and put security measures to restrict their action, while organizations deployed strategies to ensure a minimal space for action.

A solution does not lie only in enabling legal regulations but more in the political domain itself. Without opening spaces for action and organization to the various societal forces, we shall not have the necessary momentum and energy to reformulate the structure of the state to be more representative of its various societal elements from the bottom up.

Against this background, this paper addresses the relationship between human rights organizations and the state in Egypt. It concludes that the danger to Egypt and other similar states lies not in what existing regimes claim about foreign conspiracies and external military threats, but rather in the continuation of the status quo, in which a modern democratic state cannot be built. Human rights organizations, for their part, may have to build a wider network on a large scale with other civil society organizations and work to confront political repression and to build alliances with social and political forces that enable them to influence decision-making within state institutions. These alliances could also enable rights NGOs to have more influence on the ground by representing certain social groups and adopting their causes.