Hani Shukrallah
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Hani Shukrallah (also spelled Hany; Arabic: هاني شكر الله; 1950 – 5 May 2019)[1] was an Egyptian journalist and political analyst. He was managing editor of Al-Ahram Weekly from 1991 and 2005 and later founder and until February 2011[2] editor-in-chief of Ahram Online, both part of the state-run Al-Ahram Foundation. He was also the Executive Director of the Heikal Foundation for Arab Journalism.[3]
Shukrallah was born in Cairo,[4] Egypt in 1950 to a Coptic Christian family, and was raised in the city.[4] His sister Hala, is the first Coptic woman to head an Egyptian political party.[5] Throughout the 1970s, he was a student activist during the presidency of Anwar Sadat. He described himself as a "Marxist," but antagonistic of the "dogmatic leftist thinking" that he said marked many of the socialist and communist countries during that period. He became an advocate of the human rights movement in Egypt during this period and together with Saad Eddin Ibrahim co-founded the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) in April 1985, during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. Shukrallah attests that the EOHR was largely ignored by the government, opposition parties and factions—including Islamists—and the intellectual elite of Egypt and the organization struggled in documenting human rights violations and ensuring the accuracy of victims' testimonies.[6]
