Amnesty International: free Sudanese student activist
By Toby Collins
January 24, 2012 (LONDON) – Human rights advocacy group, Amnesty International (AI), is calling on people to lobby Sudanese politicians for the release of student activist Taj Alsir Jaafar, who was arrested on 30 December 2011.
AI’s 24 December statement claims Jaafar is being held incommunicado and is “at risk of torture or other ill-treatment”. I also claims Jaafar may have been detained for exercising his right to freedom of expression and association.
Jaafar’s mother was informed that the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) were holding her son on 18 January. She was not told his exact whereabouts so took a parcel for him to NISS headquarters. Since then plain-clothed individuals have threatened her twice.
Jaafar is a Khartoum University student coordinator for the opposition party The Movement of New Democratic Forces (HAQU).
He was arrested for his part in student protests from mid-December 2011 to January 2012, including a sit-in protest at Khartoum University; on 4 March 2011 he was arrested for taking part in a peaceful election event held by the activist group, Girifna; on 22 January 2011 he was arrested by NISS for distributing a Grifna magazine; on 6 March 2010 he and other Grifna members were arrested at a peaceful protest; he was also allegedly tortured during detention by NISS in 2009.
AI are asking people to write to the Sudanese ministers of justice and interior and the president, to call for the release and good treatment of the “prisoner of conscience”, Jafaar; the cessation of the harassment of his mother; and respect for the rights of Sudanese people to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.
With the external pressure of the revolutionary rhetoric that came with regime change in neighbouring Egypt and Libya, and the internal pressure of a hike in the cost of living with the oil-starved economy faltering in the wake of the secession on South Sudan, Sudan’s government has been clamping down on dissent.
(ST)