In 1993, Hassan along with Mohamed el Sayed Said founded the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) as a human rights NGO with a regional geographic mandate in the Arab region. The underlying philosophy behind the CIHRS was to disseminate and entrench human rights culture within the Egyptian and Arab cultures to create a process of progressive change. Stemming from this philosophy, one of CIHRS' first activities was its Annual Human Rights Summer Course for university students as well as other programs such as Political Islam and Human rights and Arts and Literature in Human Rights, with the overarching objective of instilling and rooting the universal values of human rights across all spectrum's of the Arab societies and cultures.