Egypt: obama gave egypt 1.d billion as 23 million are jobless 4 Sinai Nightmare for Migrants | Human Rights Watch http://bit.ly/Urlkuq"
7:29 AM - 5 Sep 12 · Details
Target Traffickers Who Detain, Torture, Sexually Assault Hundreds
SEPTEMBER 5, 2012
A girl’s dress caught on the Sinai border fence separating Egypt and Israel.© 2008 Natan Dvir (www.natandvir.com)
RELATED MATERIALS:
Thousands of sub-Saharan asylum seekers and migrants attempting to cross the Sinai have fallen victim to abusive traffickers and other criminals.
Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division
(New York) – Egypt should use its increased security force presence in the Sinai Peninsula to free hundreds of migrants held for ransom and abused by human traffickers and other criminals. Security forces should detain, investigate, and prosecute the traffickers.
Human Rights Watch has documented the trafficking of the mostly sub-Saharan migrants and asylum seekers in Sinai, who are tortured and sexually assaulted to press their relatives for ransom. Under Mubarak, law enforcement officials did not intervene to protect the victims, although Egypt has a strong anti-trafficking law. President Muhammad Morsy ordered security forces to “impose full control” over Sinai following the August 5, 2012, attack on a security post on the border with Israel that left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead.
“Thousands of sub-Saharan asylum seekers and migrants attempting to cross the Sinai have fallen victim to abusive traffickers and other criminals,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “Egypt’s new government should use its increased law enforcement operations to rescue victims of trafficking and end these abuses.”
Credible sources in Cairo confirmed to Human Rights Watch a steady increase in the number of trafficking victims who have been tortured, raped, and otherwise sexually assaulted over the past two years.
Human Rights Watch has received numerous reports in recent years of organized criminal groups detaining asylum seekers and migrants in Sinai for extortion before allowing them to complete the journey to Israel. In December 2010, Human Rights Watch reported a well-established trafficking network in Sinai that victimized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sub-Saharan asylum seekers and migrants, most of them Eritreans. The traffickers imprison their victims in various locations in Sinai for weeks or months until their relatives abroad pay tens of thousands of dollars to secure their release. Those unable to pay are kept in captivity and made to work off their debt, sometimes through agricultural or cleaning tasks, credible community sources told Human Rights Watch.
Under former President Hosni Mubarak the government refused to acknowledge that sub-Saharan African migrants were falling victim to these criminal networks, which have flourished in the absence of proper law enforcement in Sinai, Human Rights Watch said. This position is inconsistent with Egyptian and international law on trafficking, which requires the government to protect victims of trafficking and prosecute traffickers.
Egypt’s Law 64 on the Combat of Human Trafficking in article 2 defines trafficking as the sale or transport, of people through the use of force, or abduction, fraud or deception, or exploiting people for purposes such as forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery or servitude.
Trafficking of African migrants and asylum seekers in Sinai falls squarely within that definition, yet Egyptian authorities have not taken action to stop the trafficking, protect the victims, and prosecute those responsible, Human Rights Watch said. There have been no known prosecutions of traffickers and other criminals responsible for abuses against African migrants and asylum seekers in Sinai.
Human trafficking prosecutions are rare, according to the groups working most closely on the issue, and investigations have focused solely on cases of foreign domestic workers or Egyptians being trafficked abroad. In one recent case, on August 20, the Omraniya prosecutor’s office ordered the detention of a Cairo-based Qatari police officer and his wife on charges of trafficking after their 26-year-old Indonesian domestic worker jumped to her death from the fourth floor of their apartment building in Giza, Cairo. The worker was regularly locked inside, the official charges said. Prosecutors released both on bail the next day.
“President Morsy’s government should distance itself from the policies of the Mubarak regime and take the rights of victims of trafficking into account in planning law enforcement operations in Sinai.” Stork said. “Law enforcement in Sinai should be conducted in line with human rights law to avoid a further breakdown of trust with Sinai inhabitants.”
For more information about human trafficking and abuse of detainees in Sinai and the security situation there, please see the below text.
