Another Ally Torturing Children
The following article was censored from the Middle East Times in Cairo last week. No panties here as the reciepient of billions in US aid continues to operate under emergency law for decades with impunity, cruelty and in silence:
Egypt’s leading human rights organization released its 2004 annual report last week indicating that torture in prisons across the country was common and widespread despite government denials.
STORY WAS CENSORED FROM THIS WEEK’S PRINTED EDITIONThe 2004 annual report released by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) last week documents hundreds of cases of abuses of human rights and dozens of deaths from torture.The 323-page report entitled, “The Conditions of Human Rights in Egypt,” said that 412 cases of torture and 120 torture deaths have been documented between 1993 and 2004.
It said that between April 2003 and April 2004, no less than 41 cases of torture had been recorded, of which 15 likely led to death.But, the numbers are the tip of the iceberg. Many more cases of torture go unreported.
”Torture in Egypt is committed on a daily basis and is widespread in police stations, state security headquarters, and prisons,” said the report. “Torture is regularly used by police to extract confessions from suspects or their relatives leading to many deaths.”
Twelve-year-old Abdullah Rizq Abdallah was one of those cases. His small body finally gave out after seven days of torture by police using electrical shocks to make him confess to theft.In another case, a widow told EOHR that the last time she saw her husband alive in a police cell he told her that he was going through “torture that no human being can imagine.”
The report said threats to the life of citizens in Egypt used to come primarily from armed Islamic groups, but now they come from the security authorities. The report put the finger on state security officers in Cairo as committing the majority of documented cases of torture last year. It said they were encouraged to do so because there was very little chance of being prosecuted.
Freedom of expression in Egypt fared no better last year. Newspapers and books were frequently confiscated, said the report, and journalists had been arrested despite President Hosni Mubarak’s ban on the imprisonment of journalists for writing ‘offensive’ articles.
The EOHR also highlighted electoral violations of cronyism and intimidation in the 2003 parliamentary elections.”Security forces interfered in favor of the ruling National Democratic Party candidates by preventing supporters of opposition candidates from casting their votes,” said the report.
Many of these violations are consequences of the Emergency Law, implemented by Mubarak after the assassination of former president Anwar Sadat in 1981. The law gives the government sweeping powers to arrest and hold people without trial and to ban public gatherings.
The EOHR insisted in its report that the need for the Emergency Law had long expired.
”The government has exhausted all its excuses to prolong the state of emergency by claiming they are fighting terrorism… No militant operations have taken place in Egypt since the Luxor massacre of 1997,” said the report.
