Egypt 🇪🇬 barred Human Rights Watch 🔎 website 💻

Egypt has blocked the website of Human Rights Watch just a day after the organisation released a report on systematic torture in the country's jails.

The report, titled "We Do Unreasonable Things Here" and based on the accounts of 19 former detainees and the family of another, claimed Egyptian authorities used arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and torture.

"The report ... is a new episode in a series of deliberate defamation by such organization, whose politicized agenda and biases are well known and reflect the interests of the entities and countries sponsoring it," said foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid.

"Egyptian authorities keep insisting that any incidents of torture are isolated crimes by bad officers acting alone, but the Human Rights Watch report proves otherwise," Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said on Thursday.

Since then, hundreds of other news sites and blogs have been wiped from Egyptian screens with the most recent count at 424, according to the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, a non-governmental organisation tracking the affected sites through software that monitors outages.

UCJ, UNILORIN.