Security forces under Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi have arbitrarily arrested, forcibly disappeared and tortured children as young as 12 while prosecutors and judges turned a blind eye, an international rights group said yesterday.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the US, France and other EU nations to halt their support to Egyptian security forces until authorities take measurable steps to end the abuses and hold those responsible accountable.
“Children are describing being waterboarded and electrocuted on their tongues and genitals, and yet Egypt’s security forces are facing no consequences,” HRW children’s rights director Bill Van Esveld said.
A spokesman for the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the police, was not immediately available for comment.
In a 43-page report, the New York-based group said it documented abuses against 20 children aged 12 to 17 at the time of arrest.
Fifteen of them said they were tortured in pretrial detention, usually during interrogation while held incommunicado, HRW said.
Seven children said security officers tortured them with electricity, including with stun guns, it added.
The group quoted a boy it said was arrested at age 16 as telling a relative that he worried he might “never marry or be able to have children,” because of what security officials had done to him in detention.
HRW said it and Belady, a nongovernmental organization aiding street children, corroborated statements from the children, their families and defense lawyers, using court documents, appeals to authorities, medical records and videos.
“The harrowing accounts of these children and their families reveal how Egypt’s machinery of repression has subjected children to grave abuses,” Belady codirector Aya Hijazi said.
Hijazi is a dual US-Egyptian citizen who was held in detention for nearly three years over accusations related to Belady, which is Arabic for “our nation.”
She was arrested along with her husband and six others in May 2014 on charges of abusing children; she was acquitted and released three years later.
According to the HRW report, Belal B. was 17 years old when Egyptian security officers arrested him and put him in solitary confinement at a Cairo police station.
“I knew nothing about my parents and they knew nothing about me,” HRW quoted him as saying.
Officers then “tied me to a chair for three days,” causing severe pain, he added.
The group said Egypt’s criminal justice system has failed to “seriously investigate the children’s allegations of torture and ill-treatment.”
The report alleged that a prosecutor in one case threatened to send a boy “back to the officer” who had tortured him if the boy refused to make a confession.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS