Taalat Hosni Quranu Ali Al Sharkawy, a 40-year-old lawyer

On 19 August 2015, Taalat got on a train to Cairo at Beni Suef train station. While the train was still on the platform, members of the Homeland Security – Egypt's main domestic security services − started to search the various coaches until they reached his. According to witnesses that called his family following his arrest, Talaat was arrested by the officers without any reason and took to an undisclosed location. On the same day, fearing that something might happen to him while in detention, his family sent telegrams to the General Prosecutor's office and to the Public Prosecutor of Beni Suef, but to no avail.

Abdelrahman Mohammed Abdelbasser, 30-year-old, unemployed

On 1 September, at night, members of the Homeland Security and of the Central Security Forces – a paramilitary force assisting the police − raided Abdelrahman's family house in Shakshouk village, on the shore of Lake Quaron in the Fayium Governorate. Without explaining why they were there, they started to search the entire house and beat up Abdelrahman's father when he complained about their presence. After confiscating personal items and mobile phones, they arrested Abdelrahman and left for an unknown location. Solicited by telegram two days after by his family, the Public Prosecution's office of Fayium, the Security Forces, the Ministry of Justice and the Interior Ministry did not answer to date.

As a consequence, the families of both Taalat and Abdelrahman are without news and are particularly worried since the Homeland Security and the Security Forces are notorious for ill-treating and torturing individuals with impunity, most of the time to extract confessions, such as in the case of a sales director in August 2015, even forcing the victim to sign confessions under the threat of further tortures before the public prosecutor.

"Apart from the fact that the Egyptian security forces are wilfully violating Egypt's international human rights obligations through systematic enforced disappearances and incommunicado detention, the absence of supervision of detention places and, worse, the absence of prosecution of the perpetrators of such crimes creates an environment of impunity that favours more and more abuses against citizens by the security apparatus," explained Thomas-John Guinard, Regional Legal Officer for the Nile at Alkarama. "There is an urgent need for the authorities to address this practice and for the international community to realise how far Egypt has come in violating both its national law and international obligations."

Left with no other recourse at the national level, Taalat and Abdelrahman's families turned to Alkarama that sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) to ask the Egyptian authorities to immediately release the two men. The authorities should put an end to the widespread practice of enforced disappearances, including by creating monitoring bodies to supervise the security apparatus' activities and effectively prosecute those who commit abuses.

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