Hani Shukrallah

Hani Shukrallah (also spelled Hany; ; 1950 – 5 May 2019) 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 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. Egypt in 1950 to a Coptic Christian family, and was raised in the city. 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.

Journalism career In 1991 Shukrallah was appointed managing editor and later editor-in-chief of the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly. He continued to work for the state-run Al-Ahram Foundation which publishes the Al-Ahram Weekly, becoming a consultant to the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies think tank that year, a job he held until late 2008. In 2009 he served as the co-chief editor of the Al-Shorouk daily, a paper he helped establish. Throughout his career in journalism, Shukrallah also wrote articles in the London-based Al-Hayat and The Guardian, the Indian magazine Outlook and the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Shukrallah joined the Social Democratic Party, but later left the party. He became a critic of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took power after Mubarak's ouster in February 2011 and claimed they had intended "to stop the revolution at every juncture." He was also critical of the Muslim Brotherhood and supported the ouster of Mohamed Morsi from power, writing that mass protests against Morsi on 30 June "put[ting] somewhere between 30-40 percent of the nation’s adult population on the streets in a single day."