Yassmine Hussein (NYU Gallatin) |Cairo 52| Cairo, Egypt
My name is Yassmine Hussein, and during this summer of 2023, I will be interning at Cairo52, a research institute that caters to the simplification of legal materials and policy to enable its mainstream consumption and understanding by the Egyptian population. Cairo52 attempts to connect this reproduced simplified legal material that they create to the basic concepts of human rights. Among the populations that Cairo52 work with to promote their basic human rights are sex workers, specifically in Egypt.
While in some countries there are legal pleas to address the harsh laws and policies directed at sex workers, Egypt faces an even more dire situation, sex workers are not even treated according to the law and constitution of Egypt, in contrast, sex workers in Egypt are treated as second class citizens, invisible to the state allowing atrocities and ill-treatment to be directed towards them.
This summer my aim is to support Cairo52 in their work addressing the visibility of sex workers and other at-risk populations in Egypt while communicating the laws and policies that are already in place to them as well as to the larger Egyptian communities in a more accessible manner.