UN asks for more time to examin Sudanese refugees in Egypt
Jan 16, 2006 (CAIRO) — The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) called Monday on Egyptian authorities to freeze plans to deport hundreds of Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers.
“We met with the minister of foreign affairs (Ahmed Abul Gheit) and we gave him an update of what we have been doing in prisons (with the detained Sudanese) and asked for more time,” a UNHCR spokeswoman said.
“We asked to continue interviews outside of prisons. We are not talking about criminals,” said Astrid van Genderen Stort. “We haven’t been told how much more time we will be given.”
More than 400 Sudanese, including women and children, are being held since a protest outside the UNHCR offices in Cairo by more than 2,000 Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers was brutally dispersed by Egyptian police on December 30.
Thousands of riot police wielding batons and water canon broke up a three-month sit-in in central Cairo, killing at least 28 people, including women and children.
The UN agency has been interviewing the Sudanese whom the Egyptian authorities have threatened to deport to determine their status and whether they are entitled to international protection.
Some 600 Sudanese were listed for deportation but more than 160 of them were released from detention centres last Wednesday after the UNHCR’s intervention.
“One hundred and ninety-one women and children remain in detention, while 73 others have been released,” said van Genderen Stort, adding a seven-year-old girl was freed last week.
“I don’t know why she was in prison, we reunited her with her mom. We presented a recommandation that all women and children be released,” said the spokeswoman.
The UNHCR is also asking for the immediate release of all Sudanese from the conflict-hit region of Darfur in western Sudan. “They shouldn’t be deported,” said the spokeswoman.
Egypt has said it intends to expel Sudanese deemed illegal immigrants.
Most of the Sudanese who protested outside the UNHCR’s office are from the south, where a civil war that lasted more than two decades and ended in January 2005 displaced more than four million people.
The group also included people from Darfur, where as many as 300,000 people have died in nearly three years of conflict between government forces and ethnic minority rebels fighting for greater autonomy for the region.
Sudanese families in Cairo say that several demonstrators are still unaccounted for and several rights groups have called for an investigation into last month’s violence.
(ST/AFP)