Last month, during a controversial three-day state visit, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi received France’s highest award, the Legion d'Honneur, at the Elysee Palace in Paris. Days earlier, at a joint press conference with Sisi on 7 December, French President Emmanuel Macron was pressed on France’s arms exports to Egypt, considering the country’s deteriorating human rights situation. Macron categorically stated that such exports and security cooperation are not conditional on human rights, highlighting the importance of the military regime in Cairo as an ally in the fight against “terrorism”.
France is Egypt’s top supplier of arms, and there is considerable evidence that some of these arms are used in the direct repression of dissent. Some of these deals are even financed by French government loans.
During the visit, the Egyptian dictator and Macron engaged in a bizarre debate on the primacy of religious over human values. Sisi stated that “the rank of religious values is much higher than human values... they are holy and above all other values”, to which Macron responded: “We consider human values are superior to everything else. That’s what was brought by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the foundation of the universalism of human rights.”
