Amnesty: Ill treatment of detainees rife in Middle East

There has been a sharp deterioration of human rights and freedoms across the world, a report by Amnesty International has revealed.

Published yesterday, the document said: “2016 saw the idea of human dignity and equality, the very notion of a human family, coming under vigorous and relentless assault.”

Read: Iraq government, Shia militias, Daesh all committed war crimes in 2016 – Amnesty

The assault against human rights it believes is emanating from “powerful narratives of blame, fear and scapegoating, propagated by those who sought to take or cling on to power at almost any cost.”

The weakening of human rights it writes is a consequence of “a new bargain offered by governments to their people – one which promises security and economic betterment in exchange for surrendering participatory rights and civil freedoms.”

Read: Amnesty accuses Tunisia security forces of abuses

Reviewing the vast majority of countries in the world, the 408 page report provides countless examples of the contempt of universal ideals. The report cites the deliberate bombing of hospitals in countries like Syria and Yemen; refugees being pushed back into conflict zones; the world’s near-total inaction in Aleppo, which called to mind similar failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica in 1994 and 1995. It also highlight that governments across almost all regions of the world had carried out massive crackdowns on silence dissent, as examples of degradation of human rights.

The report states that no part of the world was untouched by sweeping crackdowns on dissent. The quest to silence critical voices, it states, surged in its scale and intensity across large parts of the world.

Repression of dissent

Across the Middle East and North Africa, repression of dissent was endemic. In Egypt, security forces arbitrarily arrested, forcibly disappeared and tortured alleged supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood organisation, as well as other critics and opponents of the government.

Authorities in Egypt ordered the closure of a centre renowned for its treatment of survivors of torture and victims of political violence, froze the assets of other human rights groups, and published new draft legislation that threatened to make it impossible for independent NGOs to continue to operate.

Read: Algeria arrests those ‘peacefully criticising the government’, Amnesty

Bahraini authorities ruthlessly prosecuted critics on a range of national security charges. In Iran, the authorities imprisoned critics, censored all media and adopted a new law that made virtually any criticism of the government and its policies liable to criminal prosecution

Security forces throughout the region arbitrarily arrested and detained actual and suspected government critics and opponents, often using vague and broadly drawn laws. In Syria, many detainees were forcibly disappeared after they were seized by government forces. In Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) detainees were frequently subjected to enforced disappearance: cut off from the outside world, deprived of legal protection and tortured to force “confessions” that courts used to convict them at trial.

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The report cites Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the UAE, as examples where torture and other ill treatment of detainees have become rife.

The court systems in many of the regimes in the Middle East have failed to remain neutral. Courts in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the UAE repeatedly failed to conduct fair trials, particularly in cases where defendants faced national security or terrorism-related charges, including the death penalty cases.