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An enforced disappearance is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support or acquiescence of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law. Often, forced disappearance implies murder whereby a victim is abducted, may be illegally detained, and is often tortured during interrogation, ultimately killed, and the body disposed of secretly. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability as there is no evidence of the victim's death.
Ghost detainee is a term used in the executive branch of the United States government to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous. Such uses arose as the Bush administration initiated the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. As documented in the 2004 Taguba Report, it was used in the same manner by United States officials and contractors of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003–2004.
Gao Zhisheng is a Chinese human rights attorney and dissident known for defending activists and religious minorities and documenting human rights abuses in China. Because of his work, Zhisheng has been disbarred and detained by the Chinese government several times, and severely tortured. He last disappeared in February 2009 and was unofficially detained until December 2011, when it was announced that he has now been imprisoned for three years. His commitment to defending his clients is influenced by his Christian beliefs and their tenets on morality and compassion.
Human Rights in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are substantially restricted. The UAE does not have democratically elected institutions and citizens do not have the right to change their government or form political parties. Activists and academics who criticize the government are detained and imprisoned, and their families are often harassed by the state security apparatus. There are reports of forced disappearances of foreign nationals and Emirati citizens, who have been abducted, detained and tortured in undisclosed locations, and denied the right to a speedy trial and access to counsel during investigations by the UAE government. Human Rights Watch states that Emirati laws maintain capital punishment and discriminate against women, migrants and LGBT individuals.
Human rights in Syria are effectively non-existent. The country's human rights record is considered one of the worst in the world. As a result, Syria has been globally condemned by prominent international organizations, including the United Nations, Human rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the European Union. Civil liberties, political rights, freedom of speech and assembly are severely restricted under the Ba'athist government of Bashar al-Assad, which is regarded as "one of the world's most repressive regimes". The 50th edition of Freedom in the World, the annual report published by Freedom House since 1973, designates Syria as "Worst of the Worst" among the "Not Free" countries. The report lists Syria as one of the two countries to get the lowest possible score (1/100).
Human rights in Egypt are guaranteed by the Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt under the various articles of Chapter 3. The country is also a party to numerous international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, the state of human rights in the country has been criticized both in the past and the present, especially by foreign human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. As of 2022, Human Rights Watch has declared that Egypt's human rights crises under the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is "one of its worst ... in many decades", and that "tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists, peaceful activists, and human rights defenders, remain imprisoned on abusive 'terrorism' charges, many in lengthy pretrial detention." International human rights organizations, such as the aforementioned HRW and Amnesty International, have alleged that as of January 2020, there are some 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. Other complaints made are of authorities harassing and detaining "relatives of dissidents abroad" and use of "vague 'morality' charges to prosecute LGBT people, female social media influencers, and survivors of sexual violence." The Egyptian government has frequently rejected such criticism, denying that any of the prisoners it holds are political prisoners.
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Ahmad Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Naggar was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an Islamist terrorist group active since the 1970s. The ADL dubbed him the "propaganda chief" of the militant organisation. He was one of 14 people subjected to extraordinary rendition by the CIA prior to the 2001 declaration of a War on Terror.
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The 2011 crackdown on dissidents in China refers to the arrest of dozens of mainland Chinese rights lawyers, activists and grassroots agitators in a response to the 2011 Chinese pro-democracy protests. Since the protests, at least 54 Chinese activists have been arrested or detained by authorities in the biggest crackdown on dissent since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Since the start of the protests in mid-February 2011, human rights groups have claimed that more than 54 people have been arrested by authorities, some of whom have been charged with crimes. Among those arrested are bloggers who criticise the government such as Ai Weiwei, lawyers who pursue cases against the government, and human rights activists.
Li Heping is a civil rights lawyer in the People's Republic of China and a partner of the Beijing Global Law Firm who was abducted on 10 July 2015. He is a prominent figure in China's Weiquan movement, having defended underground Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, dissident writers, and victims of forced evictions, among others.
The Temara interrogation center, also known as Temara secret detention center, is an extrajudicial detainment and secret prison facility of Morocco located within a forested area of Rabat, Morocco. It is operated by the Directorate for the Surveillance of the Territory, a Moroccan domestic intelligence agency implicated in past and ongoing human rights violations, which continues to arrest, detain and interrogate individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism-related activities outside of the Moroccan legal framework.
Fabián Nsue Nguema is the most prominent human-rights lawyer in Equatorial Guinea which, under Teodoro Obiang, has been referred to as one of the most repressive regimes in Africa. He is a member of Equatorial Guinea's only legal opposition party, Unión Popular (UP), which frequently denounces human rights violations, and of which he has served as secretary-general. He has defended a number of political prisoners in trials.
Tora Prison is an Egyptian prison complex for criminal and political detainees, located in Tora, Egypt. The complex is situated in front of the Tora El Balad metro station. The main buildings in the Tora Prison complex are Tora Agricultural Prison, Tora Liman, Tora Istiqbal (reception), Tora El Mahkoum and Tora Supermax prison, also known as Scorpion Prison.
The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) (Arabic: المفوضية المصرية للحقوق و الحريات, romanized: al-Mafwaḍiyyah al-Miṣriyyah lil-Ḥuqūq wal-Ḥurrīyāt) is an Egyptian human rights organisation based in Cairo. The organisation has been subject to continuous harassment by the Egyptian authorities after reporting on human rights abuses by the el-Sisi government. ECRF is one of the very few human rights organisations still operating inside a country increasingly hostile to dissent and in which countless civil society organisations have been forced to close. The commission coordinates campaigns for those who have been tortured or disappeared, as well as highlighting numerous incidences of human rights abuses.
Moataz Wadnan is an Egyptian journalist for HuffPost Arabi. In February 2018, after interviewing Hisham Geneina, Wadnam was arrested and subsequently disappeared in state custody.
Maryam Akbari Monfared is a supporter of the People's Mojahedin of Iran. Three of her brothers and one of her sisters were executed during the 1988 mass executions in Iran.
Raheleh Rahemipour is a human rights activist from Tehran, Iran. She is best known for her campaigns to search for her forcibly disappeared family members, and for her peaceful activism for other victims of summary execution and enforced disappearance.
Hoda Abdul Moneim is an Egyptian human rights lawyer, activist and a member of the board of directors of the Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedom and a former member of National Council for Human Rights in Egypt. She was arbitrarily arrested in November 2018 without a warrant of arrest and taken to an unknown location, held incommunicado for 21 days. Following her trial, she was sentenced to five years in prison and another five years probationary sentence with an order to spend every night of the five years at police station.
Azzouz Mahgoub is an Egyptian lawyer, human rights activist and member of the Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedom (ECRF). Mahgoub and Ezzat Ghoneim the head of ECRF went missing in March 2018 after vising Al-Haram police station. Mahgoub was held on state enforced disappearance for five months.
References
- 1 2 Egypt: Lawyer and human rights defender Ezzat Ghonim at risk of enforced disappearance, Amnesty International, 2 March 2018.
- 1 2 Urgent Action: Egyptian Defenders and Journalists Detained, Amnesty International, 2 April 2018.
- ↑ Nour Youssef, Egypt Hangs 15 for Terrorism, Stoking Fears Among Islamists, The New York Times , December 26, 2017.
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