International rights group Amnesty International released a damning report Wednesday, accusing the Egyptian government and security forces of being behind the detention of over 34,000 people and the documented disappearance of 630 citizens in the first five months of 2016 alone.
The 71-page report entitled ‘Officially, You Do Not Exist’ claims “Egypt is caught in a steely grip of repression.” In interviews with 70 lawyers, NGO workers, released detainees, and family members of torture victims and the disappeared. The report also describes the horrid treatment incurred by inmates, including various torture techniques like electrocution, blindfolding, beating, suspension from arms and legs, and sexual abuses like rape. Some of the arrested were as young as 14 years old.
14-year-old Aser Mohamed was arrested without a warrant, according to his sister, and then subject to serious human rights abuses.
“He had severe electric shock wounds on his lips, head, arms and chest,” his sister told CNN. “They showed no mercy for the fact that he was only 14 years of age and even hung him by the wrists for a whole day till his arms gave in and dislocated.”
Such treatment by security forces surpasses previous regimes for cruelty. “During the Mubarak and Morsi era, we counted the number of victims by year,” Egyptian author and activist Basma Abdel Aziz told me earlier this year. “Maybe we lost five people [in one year]. Now we count [that many] by day or week.”
Four Years Later, Egypt’s Revolution Is In A ComaWorld CREDIT: AP CAIRO, EGYPT – Outside a café in a Cairo neighborhood named for famed Egyptian revolutionary Saad…thinkprogress.orgAhmed Abu Zeid, a foreign ministry spokesman, told CNN that torture is illegal in Egypt and that the government formed a committee to investigate the forced disappearances.
“The Public Prosecution investigates all such allegations, and takes the appropriate legal procedures in every case to ensure that the law is enforced, and that those guilty of violations are held accountable,” Abu Zeid said. Rights groups, however, said there is no evidence of any such committee.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been in power for just over two years now. Although Sisi’s rise to power was criticized by many, there was a large portion of Egyptians that felt he would return security to the country. It didn’t take long, however, for Sisi’s regime to not only return to repressive techniques used under former regimes but to find new ways to suppress any dissent.
“The past 18 months have also seen the emergence of a new pattern of human rights violations against political activists and protesters, including students and children, hundreds of whom have been arbitrarily arrested and detained and subjected to enforced disappearance by state agents,” the report says. “Those detained in this way did not have access to their lawyers or families and were held incommunicado outside judicial oversight. Local NGOs allege that an average of three to four people are abducted and arbitrarily subjected to enforced disappearance each day.”