During the meeting with the WGEID, the UN experts expressed their gratitude to Akarama for its work on enforced disappearancesand its seamless collaboration with their mandate. The key countries covered during the discussion were Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Algeria.

Highlighting the difficulties in documenting and monitoring cases, particularly in the countries affected by armed conflicts, such as Syria and Iraq, Mr. Rachid Mesli, legal director of Alkarama addressed the difficulties faced by the organisation also in other parts of the Arab world, such as Egypt and Algeria.

Alkarama also raised the issue of persons previously arrested and detained in Iraq by American occupation forces after 2004 and who are now amongst the disappeared; some detainees were "returned" to the Iraqi authorities after the American withdrawal; to date, no list of missing persons has, however, been made public.

Regarding Egypt, where Alkarama has documented an increasing number of cases of enforced disappearance in the last month, Mr. Mesli established a worrying parallel with the situation in Algeria after the military coup of 1992. The systematic use of this practice by the State, aiming to terrorise the political opponents, led to a situation qualified by UN experts of "crimes against humanity". M. Mesli therefore urged the Working Group to respond firmly to prevent the systematisation of these violations in the country.

About Algeria, subject of the attention of the Working Group for many years, Alkarama recalled the clear and constant rejection of the Algerian authorities to work with their mandate despite their repeated promises. Alkarama spoke of the expectations of the victims' families and the difficulties for an organisation to maintain a permanent contact with them many years after the submission of the cases. The formal invitation of the Algerian government to the Working group to visit the country before the end of the year, if it were to become a reality, would be an opportunity for Alkarama and the organisations of families of the disappeared to contribute to the mission experts' success.

The members of the Working group have, for their part, encouraged Alkarama to continue to submit cases of enforced disappearances in Algeria as, beyond the necessary work for the "individual and collective memory," a documentation of cases remains an essential work for the future.

As a reminder, out of 8,000 cases of officially recognised cases of enforced disappearances, over 3,000 cases have been documented, and are still under consideration by the UN Working Group which declined to classify them, considering that Algerian authorities have never provided any satisfactory answers.

WGEID experts have expressed concern over the increasing number of cases of enforced disappearances in the Arab region; Mr. Osman El Hajjé, Vice President of the Working Group, Professor and Chair of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Jinan Tripoli in Lebanon, said it was a terror practice often preferred, in certain circumstances, to extrajudicial killings.

For Ariel Dulitzky, Chairperson-Rapporteur of the WGEID, who during the meeting, expressed his strong interest towards Alkarama's work, enforced disappearances are not "crimes of the past", but a practice still too common in the world. To date, over 43,000 thousand cases have been submitted to the Working group since its creation, including a large number related to Arab countries that remain unresolved to this day.

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