Alkarama has sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearance regarding the case of human rights defender, Faten Rajab Fawaz, arrested by a Syrian Air Force Patrol on 26 December 2011. Recently transferred to an unknown location, Fawaz, who has reportedly been severely tortured in detention has not been seen since mid-July 2014.

On 5 August 2014, Alkarama sent a communication to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to call upon the Iraqi authorities to end the arbitrary detention of four security officers by releasing them immediately. Ghassan Al Kubaisi, Omar Al Noaemy, Abdulrazak Al Duleimi and Uday Al Ithawi were all arrested between December 2011 and January 2012, severely tortured and forced to make false confessions, on the basis of which they were later sentenced to death by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI).

Alkarama sent an urgent appeal to the Committee against Torture on 11 August 2014, asking the Committee to take interim measures to ensure that Morocco temporarily blocks the extradition process of Egyptian citizen, Sayed Omar Salem Omar, a senior member of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose members have been subject to a bloody crackdown by the Egyptian authorities for over a year.

On 4 July 2014, the police shot at peaceful demonstrators at the exit of a Mosque in Al Mattariyyah, with no legitimate reasons. Amongst these demonstrators was 22-year old student, Karim Jamal Mahmoud Mostafa Shama.

Hit three times in the head for demonstrating against the ongoing repression in Egypt, Shama died for expressing his ideas. He was affiliated with Al Wasat Party, a moderate Islamist political party whose members are subject to the same persecutions from the authorities as the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Alkarama has referred the case of a Syrian citizen, Azad Abdo, to the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, regarding Abdo's secret detention by the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) since his abduction in November 2013.

Alarmed and concerned about the ongoing repression of the opposition by the Djibouti authorities, Alkarama wrote an urgent appeal to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to ask for the release of Mohamed Ibrahim Waiss, a journalist arrested and arbitrarily detained since 8 August, 2014.

Djiboutian police forces arrested Waiss as he was covering a demonstration by the opposition in Djibouti city. Beaten and his eye wounded during his arrest, he was taken to the Hodan police station where he was again subjected to police violence and did not receive medical attention.

We are pleased to inform you that the call for nominations for the 2014 Alkarama Award for Human Rights Defenders is now open.

The Alkarama Award is a prize presented every year to an individual or an organisation that has contributed significantly to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Arab world. The prize giving ceremony will be held in Geneva on Thursday 11 December, to mark Human Rights Day (10 December).

14 August 2014 marks the first anniversary of the killing of al-Rabaa Adawiya and el-Nahda squares in Cairo, which claimed the lives of over a thousand Egyptians who came to demonstrate peacefully against the military coup on 3 July 2013.

Despite the unanimous condemnation of human rights NGOs and much of the international community, shocked by the scale of the massacre, no investigation has been conducted by the Egyptian authorities to establish the responsibilities for this tragedy.

The Human Rights Committee, the treaty body monitoring the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), held its 111th session in July 2014. On this occasion, the Committee reviewed Sudan's fourth periodic report and issued its concluding observations.

Akarama sent an urgent appeal today to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, concerning the abduction by the Egyptian police of Fathi Abdelradi Abdelsalam Reda on 3 August 2014. Last seen on 4 August, his family fears he will be subjected to ill-treatment during his secret detention.