In a letter addressed to the Egyptian authorities and published in the recent communications report of special procedures for the 31st session of the Human Rights Council, David Kaye, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (SR FREEDEX), voiced his concerns regarding the state of freedom of expression in Egypt, a country where dozens of journalists have been arrested in the past years. Alkarama shares the Special Rapporteur’s point of view and has in fact documented many cases of freedom of expression’s violations in Egypt to UN Special Procedures, such as to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) regarding the disappearance of journalist Sabry Anwar Mohamed Abdelhamid, after his arrest at home on 21 February 2016.

On 12 January 2016, Asser Mohammed Zahr Aldeen Abdelwarth, a 15-year-old boy, disappeared after the police arrested him at his home in Giza, leading Alkarama to send an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID). His family eventually learned that he had reappeared in detention and was able to see him on 23 February. During their visit, the 15-year-old boy told them that he had been repeatedly tortured by members of the Homeland Security while he was secretly detained, prompting Alkarama to send an urgent appeal to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (SRT) to ask the Egyptian authorities to investigate his reports and to guarantee his physical and mental health.

Between late December 2015 and early February 2016, members of the Homeland Security and of the police arrested another three men for no apparent reason. Two young brothers, Abdelmoneim and Abdelrahman Nasr Kotb Mousa and father-of-four Mohammed Gommaa Mahmoud El Safty, have been missing since and their respective families remain unaware of their fates and whereabouts, despite having solicited various official bodies. Left without any recourse at the national level, they contacted Alkarama who sent urgent appeals to the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances (WGEID), asking this United Nations Special Procedure on human rights to request the Egyptian authorities to immediately disclose their places of detention and to authorise their families and lawyers to visit them.

Despite documenting an increasing number of cases of enforced disappearances in the hands of all kinds of government forces in the country, the international community has continuously failed to address this issue with the Egyptian government. Since the beginning of the year alone, Alkarama documented several cases of enforced disappearance, five of which occurred in the space of a week, including the cases of 46-year-old electrician, Ahmed Mahmoud Mohamed Metwally − who went missing following his arrest by the army in the North Sinai on 29 October 2015 − and that of Amr Mohammed Mohammed Al Emam and Ahmed Awany Abdelbasir Mohammed − disappeared in the hands of the Homeland Security on 10 February 2016. With a view to make them reappear, Alkarama raised their respective cases with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) hoping its intervention with the Egyptian authorities will bear fruit.