Are you aware that In Eritrea, if the government so wishes, you may be arrested and just disappear without trace, without legal process and without anyone having any means of finding out what has happened to you?
Eritrea remains an appallingly unsafe place for political dissenters or anyone who attempts to escape its indefinite national service programme. Eritreans who are perceived as critical of the government are frequently arrested without being formally charged and are mostly detained indefinitely, usually without access to a lawyer. Many human rights defenders and independent journalists have been subjected to enforced disappearance, with friends and relatives deprived of information about their fate or whereabouts for many years after their arrest. No one knows how many have been “disappeared”, but it is likely to total many thousands.
Throughout 2019, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances continued, but the security forces were never held accountable for these. Hundreds of prisoners of conscience and other prisoners, including journalists, former politicians and practitioners of unauthorized religions, continued to be arbitrarily detained without charge or access to lawyers or family members. Security agents round up and arrest people from their homes, work places, churches, streets, military training camps and military units. The reasons for their arrest and their current whereabouts remain unknown.
Enforced disappearances carry with them severe consequences not just for the individual, but also for the family. All protections for a person’s right to identity, security, liberty, the right not to be tortured and all rights to judicial guarantees vanish instantaneously. Worse yet, for the family members of the disappeared, they have to live with the not knowing where their loved ones are – denied the truth – forever questioning whether the disappeared persons are alive or dead. They cannot know whether the loved one will ever come back, or whether indeed he or she is still alive. There is no possibility even for final grieving, no closure of the loss, because the truth about that person’s life or death is unknown.
In 2016, the UN Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights in Eritrea concluded that “the Government of Eritrea has imprisoned large numbers of Eritrean citizens in violation of fundamental rules of international law since 1991. In doing so, Eritrean officials intended to deprive victims of the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time and create fear among the loved ones of detainees. This, as part of a government policy to maintain control over the Eritrean population in a manner contrary to international law. The Commission thus concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Eritrean officials have committed the crime of Enforced Disappearance, a crime against humanity, in a large-scale and methodical manner since May 1991.” More recently, in March 2019, 18 experts of the UN Human Rights Committee said that they had received allegations of extrajudicial executions, torture, and other grave violations of the human rights of Eritreans who had been arbitrarily detained, never charged, and forcibly “disappeared” by agents of the government, but that Eritrea had been unwilling to clarify the fate of these missing detainees.
What Needs to Happen?
THE WORLD MUST STAND WITH THE DISAPPEARED, NAME THEM, AND CALL FOR THEIR IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL RELEASE.
30 August 2020
