القسري
the persistent nature of enforced disappearance in Yemen, exacerbated by the impunity applied to all parties to the conflict, is underscored by the 31 undersigned local, regional, and international organizations, associations, and networks.
On August 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the persistent nature of enforced disappearance in Yemen, exacerbated by the impunity applied to all parties to the conflict, is underscored by the 31 undersigned local, regional, and international organizations, associations, and networks.Since the beginning of the conflict in 2014, and after the military escalation in 2015, parties to the conflict have committed serious violations of international law and international humanitarian law. The Saudi/UAE-led Coalition, the Ansar Allah (Houthi) group, the internationally recognized Government of Yemen, authorities loyal to the Islah Party, and UAE forces and UAE-backed groups, including the Southern Transitional Council and the Joint forces, have committed--and continue to commit--enforced disappearance across Yemen.Parties to the conflict have detained hundreds of Yemenis at official and unofficial detention centers, as confirmed by the research of civil society organizations.[1] Detainees have been disappeared, tortured, and some have died in detention. According to Yemeni human rights lawyer Abdulmajeed Sabra, ‘enforced disappearance and other violations faced by civilians, including academics, journalists, human rights defenders or perceived opposition are intended to silence criticism of the authorities , and to strengthen their grip on power through the spread of fear.’ Radhya Almutawakel, the co-founder of Mwatana Organization for Human Rights, added ‘Yemen’s judiciary is unable to hold the real perpetrators of serious crimes accountable and does not have a mandate over non-Yemeni perpetrators. The judiciary is also unable to connect specific crimes to perpetrators, and demonstrate the chain of custody for the evidence it collects in order to meet the required legal standards.’In this context, Sarah Al-Areqi, researcher at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, says that “the international community should give the highest priority to the formation of an international criminal accountability mechanism to collect, preserve and analyze evidence, prepare case files and communicate with victims of violations and serious crimes, including enforced disappearance; a prelude to holding the perpetrators accountable.The cases investigated during the mandate of United Nations Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (GEE) provide reasonable grounds to believe that “parties to the conflict are continuing to engage in enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention and torture, including sexual violence, in violation of international human rights law and, depending on the level of nexus with the conflict, international humanitarian law. Such acts may also amount to war crimes, including cruel treatment and torture, committing outrages upon personal dignity.” In many investigated cases, “these violations are being committed against persons who are perceived as opposed to a particular party to the conflict, including human rights defenders and journalists.”The right to truth in grave violations of human rights, for the victims and their families and societies is one of the forgotten aspects of the conflict in YemenA mother of a detainee in Abyan spoke about her 26-year- old son: “They kidnapped my son, hid him, tortured and killed him without a charge or trial, and then they buried him. I did not get to see him.” The detainee’s mother said, “I searched for him in the most important detention centers, security prisons and departments in Abyan and Aden. I asked the Security Belt leaders I know in Abyan about him, all of whom did not know the whereabouts of my son since his abduction. I didn’t even know what the charge against him was.”According to the 2018 Stockholm peace agreement, Yemen’s parties to the conflict agreed to an exchange involving 15,000 detainees. But only about 1,056 were exchanged by October 2020, in a UN-backed deal facilitated by the Office of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen (OSESGY) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Moreover, several areas in Yemen have seen the release of arbitrarily detained persons by the local mediators. While these are considerable efforts, they are not sufficient when compared to those people who remain arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared by parties to the conflict.In this context, the undersigned organizations call on the UN Special Procedures and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to:
The organizations urge Member States of the United Nations to:
Signatories:
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ[1] Since 2016, Mwatana for Human Rights has documented 1605 incidents of arbitrary detention, 770 incidents of enforced disappearance and 344 incidents of torture, including 66 deaths in detention centers, across Yemen. In the Darkness, available at: In the Darkness: Abusive Detention, Disappearance and Torture in Yemen’s Unofficial Prisons (May 2016 – April 2020) [EN/AR] - Yemen | ReliefWeb (April, 2020)The Mothers of Abductees Association report, available at: Mothers Association Report for2017.pdf (ama-ye.org) (December, 2017)Human Rights Watch has documented At Least 5 Detainees from al-Mahrah Illegally Transferred to Saudi Arabia, Availbal at: Yemen: Saudi Forces Torture, ‘Disappear’ Yemenis | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org) (March, 2020)Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies documented cases of Violations against civilians, including journalists, human rights defenders and academics in Yemen's, including enforced disappearance and Torture. Available at: Violations against civilians, including journalists, human rights defenders and academics in Yemen - Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (cihrs.org) (October, 2021)
