On 16 September 2015, Alkarama and the Arab Coalition for Sudan (ACS) sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) regarding the abduction of member of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, Babacar Moussa Issa, by the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) on 27 August 2015. Secretly detained by the NISS, Babacar would have been repeatedly subjected to torture since his arrest.
On 27 August 2015, members of the NISS wearing civilian clothes raided 56-year-old Babacar's engineering office in downtown Khartoum and took him to an unknown location. His office was subsequently closed and has since been under surveillance. A few days later, his family heard from former detainees that Babacar had in fact been detained in the NISS building located in Khartoum's 57th Street, where he had been tortured for three consecutive days, in retaliation for his political affiliations.
His family tried to visit him but were denied entrance to the building, before being told by other detainees that he had actually been transferred to another detention centre since. Their initiatives to contact and see him have so far been unsuccessful and they fear he could be tortured again. This practice remains systematic and generalised in Sudan, particularly against individuals detained by the NISS. In fact, numerous reports emerging from detention centres have shown that the NISS tortures journalists, such as Ami Al Sunni Bannaga who was allegedly tortured in custody after his arrest while he was covering a demonstration, but also human rights defenders such as three young activists who were arrested in May 2014 and detained without charges in a NISS facility
This context is favoured by several laws, especially the National Security Act of 2010 that entitles the NISS to arrest individuals even in the absence of a legitimate suspicion that they have committed a crime and to detain them for 45 consecutive days without charges and for four and a half months without any judicial supervision. Furthermore, an immunity prevents the prosecution of NISS officers for abuses perpetrated in the course of their duty. These different elements create the breeding grounds for torture and ill-treatment in detention, without real possibilities for victims and their families to obtain justice.
With these local impediments in mind, Alkarama and ACS sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) to ask the Sudanese authorities to immediately release Babacar Moussa Issa. The Sudanese authorities should end their repression against political opponents, journalists and human rights defenders, and amend the National Security Act to put it in line with relevant human rights standards.
For more information or an interview, please contact the media team at media@alkarama.org (Dir: +41 22 734 1008).