Egypt has expelled around 30 Eritrean asylum seekers since October 2021, including children, the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on January 27, 2022. She accuses the Egyptian authorities of having detained them “in inhumane conditions”, indicates in a report Joe Stork, deputy director of the organization for the Middle East.
“Egypt should protect asylum seekers rather than deporting them to a country where they risk torture or forced recruitment into the army.”
Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watchat AFP
Citing Eritrean activists living in Egypt, the NGO reports that on December 24, 24 Eritrean asylum seekers, including six children and seven women, were expelled to their country without their asylum applications being examined. Still according to HRW, these Eritreans were “arbitrarily detained in inhumane conditions for months, in overcrowded cells, deprived of food and medicine”.
Eritrean activists accuse the Egyptian police of collaborating with the Eritrean embassy for these forced returns. “(Eritrean) diplomats forced them to sign documents in Arabic which they could not read and which are surely linked to their expulsion” to their country of origin where men and women under the age of 50 must perform their military service, sometimes for years, they add.
According to the Egyptian NGO Refugees Platform, quoted by AFP, the authorities continue to arrest Eritrean migrants and dozens of them are currently detained in Aswan, southern Egypt.
If the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified more than 20,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt in 2021, their number is surely higher because many do not register officially.
With the civil war in Ethiopia and a coup in Sudan, Eritrea’s two main neighboring countries, many Eritreans who had taken refuge there to escape military service have now crossed over to Egypt.
In mid-January 2022, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi assured the press that his country was taking great care of migrants. But Egypt is regularly singled out for its conditions of detention in general, with human rights defenders regularly reporting “torture”, “ill-treatment” and “detention of children” in places of deprivation of liberty.