On 14 January 2016, members of the Intelligence forces in civilian clothes stormed into the house of 37-year-old Haytham Fatima in Tripoli. They arrested him and took him to the premises of the Ministry of Defence, where he was secretly detained for ten days.

During his detention, Haytham was tortured by members of the Military Intelligence. He was heavily beaten, especially on the head and ears, and forced to make confessions. Due to the heavy beatings he received, Haytham lost the hearing of his right ear.

Nabil Al Halabi, Lebanese lawyer and director of the Lebanese Institute for Democracy and Human Rights (LIFE), has always been a vocal critic of corruption, the use of military courts and torture in Lebanon. Al Halabi has always been actively and frankly expressing his political views on his Facebook account.

Since the beginning of 2016, Alkarama has been documenting more and more cases of enforced disappearances in Egypt to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), including five new cases highlighted below. Omar Mohammed Ali Hamad and Mahmoud Ibrahim Mostafa Attia, have been missing since Rabaa Al Adawiya's massacre on 14 August 2013.

Known for criticising Oman's systematic repression of peaceful dissent, Said Ali Said Jadad, who has been the victim of reprisals for his human rights activism since 2013, was sentenced, on 8 March 2015, to three years imprisonment for "undermining the prestige of the state" and one year for "incitement to demonstrate" and "disturbing public order" by the Muscat Court.

On April 9, 2016 the Hamad Town Police Station summoned 15 year old Bassel Abbas Ali Hassan Jayed for interrogation which lasted over five hours and during which he was subjected to electroshocks, beaten, kicked and slapped on the face and the head and forced to stand up in stress positions. Bassel was released on the morning of April 10 only to be called back a couple of hours later to undergo interrogation at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.

On 4 May 2016, committed member of the Omani Parliament and environmental activist Talib Al Mamari was released three months prior to the end of his prison sentence. Al Mamari, who had been detained at Sama'il Prison near Muscat since August 2013, was released in the morning of 4 May on a royal pardon from Sultan Qaboos.

In 2013 a UN panel concluded that the crime of enforced disappearances in Syria was widespread and used as "tactic of war." Amongst the patterns identified, the panel was concerned over the prevalence of disappearance of individuals at checkpoints and highlighted that such practice was used by the government to punish those they suspect of supporting the opposition.

On 4 May 2016, Sudan's human rights records were reviewed at the occasion of the second cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Many States raised similar concerns to those mentioned by Alkarama in its UPR submission particularly regarding the worrying state of freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and the widespread practice of torture and ill-treatment.

As the world celebrates Press Freedom Day, many journalists and bloggers in the Arab world are paying a heavy price for their commitment to provide citizens in their countries and around the World with independent and thorough information.

Because reporting impartially on their acts and policies is seen by States in the region as a threat to their stability or sometimes simply as an insult to those in power, journalists and bloggers are targeted. Judicial harassment, arbitrary and secret detentions, torture, executions ...

On 27 February 2016, Abdulmalik Mohammad Yousef Abdelsalam, a 26 year-old Jordanian university student, after having served a prison sentence in Lebanon, was deported from Beirut to Amman Queen Alia International Airport, where he disappeared.