The Security Council,Recalling its previous resolutions and statements of its President concerning the situation in Somalia and the border dispute between Djibouti and Eritrea, in particular its resolutions 751 (1992), 1844 (2008), 1862 (2009), 1907 (2009), 1916 (2009), 1998 (2011), and 2002 (2011), and its statement s of 18 May 2009 (S/PRST/2009/15), 9 July 2009 (S/PRST/2009/19), 12 June 2008 (S/PRST/2008/20),
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Human Rights Concern Eritrea (HRCE), Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project (EHAHRDP) today called upon the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to conduct a thorough investigation into the wide-ranging human rights violations committed in Eritrea.
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CAIRO/TEL AVIV, 7 June 2011 (IRIN) – Sarame* had looked forward to leaving Eritrea with her husband and living a better life in Israel, until they found themselves kidnapped for money by local Bedouins in Egypt’s Sinai desert.

“They threatened to kill me and my husband if we did not pay,” she said. “They did not beat me, but other people were told to take off their clothes and were beaten. At the end, they separated the women from the men; they came in the night and took two girls. When the girls came back they were crying. The others did not ask what happened to them because they knew they had been raped.”
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A protest vigil was held outside the Eritrean Embassy on Thursday 26th May 2011 to remember those who have been imprisoned for religious reasons over the past nine years . In 2002, Minority Christian Churches in Eritrea began to be closed down and worshippers to be persecuted. This persecution extended itself over the years to Orthodox Church leaders and worshippers. Patriarch Antonius has been under house arrest since 2006, with no access to medical care despite his bad health. At least three other leaders are also imprisoned. Read the rest of this entry »

Four Eritrean refugees were burnt to death, and one was critically injured, after their tents were deliberately set on fire at a Tunisian refugee camp close to the Libyan border in the early hours of Sunday 22 May. Read the rest of this entry »

Eritrea is refusing to give information about four Britons it is holding and is denying consular access to them, a Foreign Office official has said.
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Milan, March 11th, 2011. According to witness accounts taken by the Physicians for Human Rights in Jaffa from a young Eritrean refugee, the Israeli defence forces have pushed back at the Egypt border a group of 67 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. The migrants, according to the boy’s statement, had just been released by traffickers in northern Sinai, after the payment of a ransom by their families. The refugees, in captivity, would have suffered ill-treatment, torture and abuse. The refoulement of refugees and asylum seekers is a serious violation of the 1951 Geneva Convention, a treaty which was also signed by Israel. What makes these actions even more hateful, is that Israeli military authorities have ordered the young soldiers to commit such a crime, when many of their own grandparents in the past experienced captivity and the horrors of the Holocaust.

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Hotline for Migrant Workers recently published a report entitled Trafficking, Slavery, Torture and Rape Victims among Asylum Seekers on their way to Israel. It details the suffering of the 12,000 people who were smuggled to Israel through the Egyptian border in 2010. Many Eritreans and Ethiopians, once reaching Egypt, were kept as hostages in inhumane conditions until a ransom was paid for their release by family members in wealthy countries. Some were told that they would be sold to organ traders if their relatives did not pay, claiming that they could get $25,000 for a kidney.

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Now that the eyes of the world are on those who wish, as we Eritreans do, to depose the dictator, there has never been a better moment to demonstrate and protest publicly. With this in mind, and ignoring freezing weather, a 20-strong group of mainly Eritrean protesters gathered outside the Eritrean Embassy in Islington yesterday, the 28^th February. Unfortunately, this will not go down as a historic day in Eritrea, but it is a new beginning at a time when we should really seize the moment that the spirit of the times seems to be offering us. Isaias Afewerki is a dictator every bit as bad as Mubarak and Gaddaffi, the main difference being that he has a much lower media profile and this is our opportunity to raise that profile by protesting in public and letting the world know at this time when it seems to be watching that we have the worst tyrant in Africa and he must go, and he must go NOW!
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