Interviews with Nora Younis

When my son grows up to be in university, I hope the public education system will be better. I am sure the human rights situation will be better. But I´m not sure about the public education. And I hope he would find in Egypt the good job and the good quality of life because this is what we are lacking. Even if you´re smart enough and you get a good job then you are living a terrible life. I hope Egypt in this time will be over its main problems to be able to look into smaller things like environment and animal rights. It breaks my heart to see how the animals are treated in the Egyptian streets now. And I hope it´s different in the future.

I hope they stop cutting the trees like the way they do just to sell the wood. And I hope they stop burning the garbage in the streets and burning the rice ashes. I hope we´ll go back to agriculture. My parents come from the Delta. And we used to have farmlands. And I was very connected with this sort of life. I spent my childhood there. So I hope we go back to agriculture and do it right. And do it in a good way. Because I think our farmers have suffered a lot in the past decades.

I hope the workers will be paid well and they will have a life and they will look beautiful and healthy. I don´t want to see them tired and in worn-out uniforms and looking like this. And I dream of police stations that will be completely safe. You can go and file a complaint and they are smart. They´re really smart. And they can, you know, find the perpetrators by detection, not by torture. And I hope there will be rule of law and five or six presidents between now and then.

Nora Younis is a human rights activist, journalist and blogger who is now working as the website managing editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm Daily Independent, one of the best known newspapers in Egypt.

As a human rights activist, Ms. Younis won the Human Rights First (HRF) thirtieth anniversary award in 2008 for her work using new media tools to expose human rights violations and police brutality.

When she started blogging in 2005 she focused on addressing the information vacuum on protest movements in Egypt. Before Twitter came into being, she was continually sending mass text messages to human rights activists, political groups, and journalists, informing them of rallies, arrests, state violence and police brutality.

After Twitter became established among Egyptians, she moved into visual documentation. Most recognized is her video of the textile workers’ strike in Mahalla in September 2007 that soon grew into a nationwide movement known as the April 6th strike. One of her most famous blog posts includes her testimonial about the brutal police raid on a Sudanese refugee protest camp in Cairo in 2005 where at least 27 men, women and children were killed. Her testimonial was translated by fellow bloggers and activists across the world into more than seven languages. It was used in law suits and human rights reports condemning the Egyptian government.

During the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Ms. Younis played a major role in documenting and reporting events. Using improvised communications methods, she filmed and disseminated to global audiences the demonstrations and crackdowns in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Before she took up her position as website managing editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm Daily Independent, Ms. Younis covered the Middle East for The Washington Post (2008) and for other international newspapers.

Twitter: @NoraYounis