In March 2016, Alkarama sent two communications to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) regarding the disappearances in November 2015 and February 2016 of two Egyptian students, Ahmed Ihab Mohamed Al Naggar and Mohammed Mohammed Abdelmotaleb Al Husseini following their arrests by the authorities. While Ahmed was reportedly seen in detention in early February 2016, without official confirmation however, Mohammed’s whereabouts remain unknown to his relatives to date and both students are at high risk of being tortured while in secret detention, either in retaliation against their alleged political affiliations or to force them to confess to crimes.

Alkarama has just solicited the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture (UNSRT) regarding the continuous detention of 10 young women - most of whom are students -, since their arrest in Damietta streets on 5 May 2015. While they were peacefully demonstrating, Sara Mohamed Ramadan, Habiba Shata, Esraa Abdo Farhat, Aya Hossam Al Shehata, Fatima Ayad, Mariam Tork, Fatima Tork, Rawda Khater, Sara Hamdi Anwar and Kholod El Fallaghy, were arrested and detained incommunicado for several days during which they were tortured and then indicted. Now detained in Port-Said prison in harsh conditions, they are facing trial and could be sentenced on the basis of documents that they signed without the possibility of reading them.

On 5 February 2016, the Egyptian authorities arrested three men in El Beheira and Kafr El Sheikh Governorates. While their families were trying to locate them, Abou Obeida Said Ahmed Al Amoury, Islam Ibrahim El Tohamy Ibrahim and Mohammed Gommaa Mahmoud El Safty were in fact secretly detained by the Homeland Security and the police. Tortured for several days, they were forced to sign confessions that they could not read. Accused of being members of an active terrorist group, they now face trial and remain detained to date. Fearing that they could be sentenced on the basis of the confessions they signed under torture, Alkarama solicited on behalf of their families, the United Nations Special Rapporteur against Torture (UNSRT) to ask the Egyptian authorities to guarantee their mental and physical state and to investigate their reports of torture.

Alkarama has just solicited the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) to urgently ask the Egyptian authorities to end the judicial harassment against 14-year-old Ibrahim and 17-year-old Ahmed Shaaban Youssef and to release the latter.