A group of Egyptian civil society organisations have been prevented from attending the Cop27 climate summit by a covert registration process that filtered out groups critical of the Egyptian government. Egypt’s foreign, environment and social solidarity ministries privately selected and screened NGOs that would be permitted to apply for one-time registration for Cop27, a separate process from applications for official observer status, which closed last year. The permitted groups were then provided with application details by the UN body responsible for overseeing Cop27, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The application process and the selection criteria were not made public, and civil society groups were not informed that they could request to attend the conference via these ministries or how they could apply, essentially shutting them out. “You don’t let a government tell the UN who is and who isn’t an NGO, certainly not the Egyptian government,” said Ahmad Abdallah, of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), one of five leading organisations unable to register to attend the conference due to the screening.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN