‘Silence while Sudan’s NISS continues violating detainees’ rights’

Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) increasingly violates the rights of detainees by using the State Security Prosecution to prolong detentions. The silence of international and national human rights organisations aggravates the situation, says the Darfur Bar Association (DBA).

The NISS increasingly uses the referral procedure to the State Security Prosecution to prolong the detention period of innocent suspects, the DBA reports in a press statement today.

The detention can be extended for several months, while the detainees are being kept under direct security supervision. “This is a flagrant violation of the law, and the constitutional and legal rights of those affected,” the statement reads.

The Darfur lawyers further state that “the international community has abandoned its moral responsibility for human rights violations in Sudan”.

“If the attention of human rights organisations and institutions concerning the detention of well-known Sudanese is dwindling, what can ordinary detainees expect? This situation has encouraged the security apparatus to continue to violate the rights of many detainees, and accuse them of crimes they have never committed,” the DBA says.

Detained

In this context, the lawyers mention Abdelhamid Abdallah Abdelkarim (30), a bachelor of Dereisa village, near Tabit in North Darfur. He supported his siblings, his father and his mother who suffers from chronic health problems with the proceeds he obtained with his “transport vehicle”, consisting of a donkey cart.

“If the attention of human rights organisations and institutions concerning the detention of well-known Sudanese is dwindling, what can ordinary detainees expect?”

On the afternoon of 1 December last year, NISS agents detained him and transferred him to El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, and later to the Kober Prison in Khartoum North. He has not been allowed to see his relatives, and was deprived of his right to see a lawyer.

His family contacted the DBA which in turn requested the State Security Prosecution's permission to meet the detainee.

“The request was registered and put in the file,” the DBA states. “No permission was granted so far, though more than two weeks have passed since. This was done on the pretext that the charges against him are related to the charges against human rights activist Dr Mudawi Ibrahim, tabled at the office of the attorney-general.”

Appeal

The Darfur lawyers appeal to human rights organisations and human rights activists in Sudan and abroad to stand by “the ordinary detainees” of the NISS, as they stand by the well-known human rights activists in detention, and demanding their release as well.

They point in this context to Abdallah Ahmed Bahreldin (36), Unamid employee, who was detained in his home in Nyala in South Darfur on 25 November, and is now being held in Kober Prison in Khartoum North, just as Khalid Yahya, Yousef Jibril, Abdelhamid Abdelkarim, and others “whose legal and constitutional rights are grossly disregarded”.