Egyptian human rights group won't help gays
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Homosexuality is so detested in Egyptian society that Egypt's largest human rights group says it cannot speak out against state prosecutions of gay men--even though foreign observers have been. French president Jacques Chirac said Saturday that he had expressed concern to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak about a court's November sentencing of 23 men to up to five years in jail for engaging in gay sex. Chirac said he was not seeking to interfere but that he hoped "those decisions might be overturned."

"What could we do? Nothing. If we were to uphold this issue, this would be the end of what remains of the concept of human rights in Egypt," Hisham Kassem, director of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said Sunday. "We let them [gays] down, but I don't have a mandate from the people, and I don't want the West to set the pace for the human rights movement in Egypt."