Last week, Ethiopia’s parliament unanimously ratified a treaty with five of its neighbors that opens the way for broad regional cooperation on the use of the waters of the Nile River.

It is a peculiar day for the Arab world when a political leader is accused of pandering simultaneously to the interests of the United States and ultraconservative sheikhs calling for global jihad. But strange bedfellows were made when Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi recently announced that Egypt would be “definitively” severing all diplomatic ties with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Following the Egyptian revolution in January 2011 a nationwide security vacuum has caused great unrest, particularly in the rugged Sinai Peninsula. Sinai’s geographic location bordering Israel and Palestine and its indigenous Bedouin population are the primary concern given the area’s influence on regional and national security.

In a letter to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Senator Tim Kaine, Senator Marco Rubio and twelve other senators, expressed deep concern regarding the recent convictions of forty-three pro-democracy, civil society workers in Egypt.

On June 4, Egypt’s courts concluded the year and a half long sentence of 43 workers in 4 non-governmental organizations based in Cairo. Sentences varied from 1 to 5 years in prison as well as the confiscation of the NGO’s assets. The defendants were accused of illegally receiving foreign funds for their respective work in Egypt.

The Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East hosted a roundtable discussion with former member of parliament and founding member of Egypt’s Social Democratic Party Ziad Bahaa-Eldin on the ongoing crisis in Egypt.

Following the Cairo Criminal Court’s conviction of forty-three non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, among them sixteen Americans, concerns for civil society groups in Egypt have grown, particularly amidst ongoing discussion of a repressive NGO law drafted by Egypt's presidency. 

In what has been the most serious affront to Egyptian civil society and prospects for democracy since the revolution and even well before then, last week brought the conviction of forty-three NGO workers and the closure of multiple NGO offices by court verdict. While a diplomatically expedient “resolution” may be pursued with the Egyptian government, a positive  response to this particular trial verdict would affirm the politicization of the judiciary and merely serve as a band-aid to a deep institutional disempowerment of civil society and the solidification of authoritarianism.