France has "participated in the bloody Egyptian repression" for the past five years by delivering weapons and surveillance systems to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government, rights groups charged in a report released Monday, reports FRANCE 24.
Commissioned by four French and Egyptian human rights groups, the study found French arms sales to Egypt had leapt from 39.6 million to 1.3 billion euros ($1.5 billion) between 2010 and 2016.
In addition, "by supplying Egyptian security services and law enforcement agencies with powerful digital tools, they have helped establish an Orwellian surveillance and control architecture that is being used to eradicate all forms of dissent and citizen action," the groups said.
They charged that French companies were also complicit in what they called a "relentless crackdown" since Sisi overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
The report notably cited companies selling technology used for mass data interception and crowd control, used for a surveillance system under which tens of thousands of opponents and activists had been arrested.
"The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was driven by an ultra-connected 'Facebook generation' that knew how to mobilise crowds," said Bahey Eldin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), one of the groups behind the report.