Egypt: While 2 Teachers Disappear Following their Arrest by the Police, the Authorities Keep Denying the Very Existence of This Practice

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On 7 February 2016, teachers Medhat Mohamed Bahi Aldin Ahmed Abdelhameed and Magdy Hassan Amer Hassan disappeared following their arrest by the Egyptian police from Medhat's apartment in Giza. Despite having solicited various official bodies to establish their fates and whereabouts, their respective families, blissfully unaware of the reasons for their arrests, were met with a wall of silence. In view of the facts and the lack of remedy at the national level, and with the hope of putting an end to their enforced disappearance, Alkarama sent an urgent appeal to the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), asking this United Nations human rights protection mechanism to request the Egyptian authorities to disclose their respective places of detention and authorise their families and lawyers to visit them.

The facts

In the afternoon of 7 February 2016, 43-year-old Medhat was with his family and teacher friend 40-year-old Magdy when, at around 3pm, the police broke into his apartment. Without showing an arrest and search warrant, they searched the flat thoroughly and beat up all the people present. Then, they took the two teachers with them and left for an undisclosed location. Medhat's relatives immediately informed Magdy's family of their arrest, and the two families went to several police stations in Medhat's area of residence − Giza's Haram neighbourhood − to try to locate them, but all police officers denied the two men's presence in their jails.

Still without news from them, on 8 and 9 February, while their lawyers contacted some police stations, both families sent telegrams to the General Prosecutor's office but to no avail. Four days after their arrest, Medhat and Magdy's whereabouts remain unknown and their families fear that they could be tortured, a systematic practice from the police and security forces in Egypt, including against youths such as 18-year-old Moaz Eid Abdelazim Ismael, tortured in detention and sentenced to two years in prison in November 2015.

The authorities' rhetoric

Despite the number of cases of people who disappeared after they were last seen in the custody of the Egyptian security forces − as reported by Alkarama and several other domestic or international human rights organisations − the authorities keep denying the practice of enforced disappearances.

In an interview with State news agency MENA in October 2015, the assistant to the Interior Minister at the human rights sector, Salah Fouad, went as far as saying, "with complete confidence there are no forced disappearances in Egypt for any person, and whoever claims otherwise must provide evidence." The cases of people who forcibly disappeared in the hands of State officials would not exist. They would simply be the fact of a smear campaign by the Muslim Brotherhood for "civil society organisations, whether international or domestic, to promote the existence of cases of forced disappearances in Egypt in order to put pressure on the Egyptian government."

"Although the authorities keep denying the practice of enforced disappearances, according to Alkarama's researches at least 4,000 individuals have been abducted and secretly detained in Egypt since July 2013," says Thomas-John Guinard, Legal Officer for the Nile Region at Alkarama. "If the majority of these individuals have reappeared since, either in detention or outside, many remain disappeared and the authorities have taken no measures to effectively end this practice or to investigate their disappearances."

Alkarama therefore calls upon the authorities to investigate all cases of enforced disappearances in the country, and to take effective measures to end this practice, including by prosecuting and punishing the perpetrators of such crimes and granting compensation to the victims and their families.

For more information or an interview, please contact the media team at media@alkarama.org (Dir: +41 22 734 1008)