Same day, July 3, three years back, millions of Egyptians took to the streets to call for President Mohamed Morsi's ouster.
The army stepped in for the second time in less than three years to remove a president following mass protests. While Morsi was democratically elected, the earlier president Hosni Mubarak was not.
Former military chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is the President now and the state does not tolerate neither protests nor criticism.
After Morsi’s ouster activists were hopeful of a bright future for the country as the military installed a government with former chief judge Adly Mansour as interim President and a liberal economist as Prime Minister.
But this just for a brief period. Security services moved to crush Morsi's Islamist supporters, detaining the ex-president and thousands of members of his Muslim Brotherhood.
The crackdown reached its pinnacle on August 14 when police shot dead hundreds of Islamists at a protest camp in Cairo during clashes - the worst mass killing in Egypt's modern history.
In May the next year Sisi was elected president with almost 97 percent of a vote boycotted by the Brotherhood and secular dissidents.
Present situation
Activists in the nation say that little remains of the democratic ideals that had swept the most-populous Arab country.
Many feel that protesters were used three years ago not to topple the Brotherhood and bring in a democratic system but to help the military take over power.
Protests unless approved by the police are banned and calling for one can get a person jailed.
Hundreds of thousands of people, including Morsi, have been sentenced to death in mass trials.
Activists say that as many as 60,000 political prisoners have been held by the authorities and they complain that human rights situation is the worst at present in Egypt.
Government’s stand
The government regularly denies there are political prisoners and says those in jail - who include a number of journalists - have all committed crimes.
Sisi has said it will take decades for Egypt to have a proper democracy but that the country nevertheless enjoys unprecedented freedom of speech.
Rights activists and many journalists disagree, and are concerned that restrictions on freedom of speech and media may be tightened further. In one of the most prominent cases against the press, authorities last month arrested three top members of Egypt's journalists' union -- including its chief Yahiya Kallash -- and charged them with harbouring two wanted journalists. The two journalists had been arrested in an unprecedented raid on the syndicate's headquarters, for allegedly inciting protests.
Many feel that protesters were used three years ago not to topple the Brotherhood and bring in a democratic system but to help the military take over power.
