training as well as, wherever operations.”37 possible, careful planning of individual 172. Furthermore, “[f]orce may be used in law enforcement only in order to stop an imminent threat”38 of death or serious injury. Force in this context includes deadly force but also any other lesser form, and while preference should be given to weapons less likely to cause death or serious injury, even such weapons can cause death or serious injury if they are abused.39 Because the right to assemble and demonstrate is integral to democracy and human rights, the General Comment provides that “[e]ven if acts of violence occur during such events, participants retain their rights to bodily integrity and other rights and force may not be used except in accordance with the principles of necessity and proportionality.”40 The Commission has held that “[a]rbitrary killings committed or tolerated by the State are a matter of utmost gravity”.41 173. The Egyptian Police Act 109 of 1971 in Article 102 stipulates the conditions under which police can use force, namely that it must be “necessary as needed to carry out one’s duty, be the only means of performing such duty in case of an assembly or demonstration that threatens public security and only after warning those concerned”. In relation to the necessity requirement, the provision 3 (c) (ii) of the Commission’s Guidelines on the Conditions of Arrest, Police Custody and Pre-Trial Detention in Africa, provides that use of firearms should be limited to where a person presents “an imminent threat of death or serious injury; or to prevent the perpetration of a serious crime involving grave threat to life.” The provision of the Police Act with its focus on necessity to maintain public security therefore falls short in a serious manner of these stringent grounds of necessity of grave threat to life or imminent threat of death or serious injury. The Act further does not engage with the proportionality aspect of the use of force. This is another serious shortcoming from a human rights perspective, since it allows a wide discretion to the police in the type of force to be used, and does not account for the right to bodily integrity or the right to life. Para 27. As above. 39 Para 30 40 Para 28 41 Para 5 of the General Comment No. 3 on the Right to Life. 37 38 45