At 10:40 p.m. on Sunday, October 31, 2021, flight MS-833, operated by the Egyptian national airline, Egyptair, took off from Cairo International Airport to head for Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.
Almost three weeks later, on the night of November 18, the same MS-833 took flight again in the Egyptian capital to repeat the route and land a few minutes before 2:30 in the morning.
On board those planes were 15 Eritreans between the ages of three and 70, members of the same family, eight of them on the first flight and the remaining seven on the second.
But none returned to Asmara of their own volition.
They were all refugees and were forcibly deported back to their country after being arbitrarily detained in Egypt for two years, and despite the enormous risk of being arrested, imprisoned and tortured again as soon as they set foot in Eritrea.
"I haven't heard from them [since then]," a relative of the family regrets to EL PAÍS on condition of anonymity, for security reasons, explaining that they entered irregularly at the end of 2019 through Sudan.
The group was arrested shortly after in Shalatin, a town in a disputed border region, and transferred to Al-Qusayr prison on the Red Sea.
They have not been the only ones.
Since the summer of 2021, the deportation of some seventy Eritrean refugees, and the threat that weighs on dozens more, after long periods in arbitrary detention and without being able to register as asylum seekers, is causing alarm among the community and human rights groups.
The uptick is of particular concern because it comes against the backdrop of escalating warfare in Ethiopia, where Eritrea, with a dismal human rights record, has sent troops.
The deportations also call into question the image that Cairo has been trying to forge in recent years as a safe place for refugees, as well as the growing interest of the European Union in increasing cooperation and channeling funds to its Egyptian counterparts. within the framework of the externalization of community borders.
From Eritrea to Egypt
The flight of Eritreans from their country comes from afar.
Over the last two decades, savage human rights abuses, indefinite conscription and a poor economic situation have made Eritrea one of the countries with the highest number of refugees in the world.
Along these lines, its citizens are subject to a strict system of national service and forced labor, which the State justifies in order to defend its integrity and guarantee its self-sufficiency, but which, in practice, are equivalent to forms of exploitation and slavery by indefinite periods, according to a 2015 report by the United Nations Human Rights Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea.
Those who make the risky decision to desert face prolonged arbitrary detention in inhumane conditions and torture and other ill-treatment, according to a 2016 investigation by Amnesty International.
The previous UN commission also found that the Eritrean government restricts movements to border areas of the country and severely punishes those who are intercepted crossing.
With few exceptions, the Commission also warned that those who are forced to return after having fled abroad are arrested, imprisoned and mistreated.
7 more Eritreans deported from #Egypt, still no word on where they are.
Is it time to replace the word "deported" with "disappeared"?
Are these children, seen detained at AL QUSEIR POLICE STATION, among the newly disappeared?
https://t.co/aqS6MdLApT pic.twitter.com/INsR9SWWbF
— Global Detention Project (@migradetention) November 19, 2021
“Nothing has changed, in fact the situation has worsened.
Now it is not good at all because there is a civil war in Ethiopia and Eritrea is involved and sends people to fight.
It's not safe to go," warns Elizabeth Chyrum, a prominent Eritrean human rights activist in the UK.
“And the prison system and torture remain.
If you leave the country illegally, you have committed a crime, and being an asylum seeker abroad is also a crime.
Therefore, the people who are returned will be persecuted, there is no doubt, ”she adds.
One of the main destinations for Eritreans has traditionally been Egypt, where some 21,000 are registered as refugees and asylum seekers, the third largest national group in the country, according to the January 2022 count of the Office of the High Commissioner for Eritreans. the UN for Refugees (UNHCR).
Cairo, a signatory to the UN and African Union conventions on the status of refugees, continues to have a relatively open-door policy, and the city is one of the cheapest in the region.
For this reason, the country's president, Abdelfatá Al Sisi, often boasts that Egypt does not have refugee camps and insists that his country does not even consider them as such, but as guests.
Human rights organizations, however, note that behind Al Sisi's apparently well-intentioned rhetoric lies another, more problematic reality.
On the one hand, because the designation of refugee defines a legal status that guarantees rights, and on the other, because the State is thus avoiding taking responsibility for their basic economic, educational or medical needs, increasing their vulnerability.
Added to this are hundreds of prolonged detentions and at least dozens of deportations.
Since 2016, moreover, these latest detention and deportation practices by the Egyptian authorities have become especially opaque.
That year, a boat carrying some 600 people sank off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, and Cairo then chose to tighten control of all its borders, closing them to irregular migrants through massive rights violations and threatening leaders of different communities, according to an anonymous source (for security reasons) from the independent Platform for Refugees in Egypt (PRE).
All this under a strict information blockade.
Since 2016, the Egyptian authorities' detention and deportation practices have become especially opaque
For the Eritrean community in particular, this delicate situation worsened from 2019. In July of that year, hundreds of refugees camped in front of the UNHCR office, near Cairo, to peacefully protest against the mistreatment they receive in Egypt. and to ask for more protection and humanitarian assistance.
Soon, the security forces violently dispersed the concentration and briefly detained almost a hundred of them.
From that moment, assures the PRE, the Government began to hinder the asylum procedures of Eritreans.
According to the PRE source, the organization has received first-hand information according to which Egypt is detaining more than 200 Eritreans in detention centers supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, after having arrested them while they entered Egyptian territory irregularly with in order to start the asylum application procedures.
Along these lines, the platform has also recorded that more than 40,000 asylum seekers and migrants from different countries have been detained in Egypt between 2019 and April 2021, according to data published by the country's border guards, although it is not clear if It is a reliable number.
“I don't think they are fairly protected;
they live in fear,” says Chyrum.
“[Egypt] does not listen to the pleas of the UN, ours, or human rights defenders.
Asylum seekers are not safe, they do not feel safe”, he cries.
Most of the 200 Eritrean migrants who remain in detention, including forty minors, are distributed among various detention centers, especially in the southern governorate of Aswan, as documented by the PRE.
These include the Central Security Forces camp in Shallal and the police departments in the towns of Kom Ombo, Daraw and Nasr El Nuba.
A precarious boat transports a group of migrants, mostly Eritreans, in northern Libya in 2021. They were rescued by the NGO Open Arms.Joan Mateu (AP)
The platform has also detected that the treatment of detainees follows a similar pattern: they are denied a trial with guarantees, they are not informed of the charges against them, they are never presented before investigative bodies or before a court. They are not allowed access to a lawyer, even ex officio, and their requests to present their asylum claims to UNHCR offices in the country are systematically denied.
Migrants languish in inhuman detention conditions, crowded into small cells, without receiving adequate food or medical or psychological assistance, the organization denounces.
They are also not allowed to exercise, and in most cases they are deprived of seeing sunlight and receiving visits from relatives.
UNHCR often receives permits to visit asylum seekers and refugees who are detained but registered, something that is rarely the case for those who are not.
Oblivious to its precarious situation, the European Union has not put a stop to its increasing cooperation with the Egyptian authorities in matters of border control and migration policy since 2016, in order to integrate the country into its iron externalization of borders in the southern Mediterranean.
In this line, Brussels and separate member states of the union have financed numerous training and advisory programs.
Migrants languish in inhuman detention conditions, crammed into small cells, without adequate food, medical or psychological assistance
On November 15, the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, advanced in a message on her Twitter profile after meeting with the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, that Brussels "is willing to deepen cooperation, with financial support, in the matter of migration in all its aspects”.
Just three days later, Cairo forcibly deported seven refugees, including five children, to Eritrea.
EL PAÍS has contacted Johansson's office to find out if she raised the situation of the Eritrean refugees during her visit to Egypt, but she has not received a response.
From Egypt to Eritrea
In the case of forced deportations, the alarms began to go off in August, when the Egyptian authorities were preparing to deport two Eritrean refugees, Alem Tesfay and Kibrom Adhanom.
Both remained in Al Qanater prison, near Cairo, where they were mistreated and kept in solitary confinement, and had been arrested in 2012 and 2013, respectively.
In their case, the deportation was aborted at the last breath and the two were finally relocated to Canada on January 20.
"I was in jail for 10 years and I didn't even know why, there was no case, no prosecutor, no mosque, no church, no reason," says Tesfay with a broken voice.
“[The Egyptian authorities] talk about prisons, about rights, about freedoms: it's all lies.
I tell you.
I spent 10 years without a case: a lawyer was prohibited, visits were prohibited, I did not see anyone, it was forbidden to call anyone, ”he adds.
“It is not possible that someone is taken from the street and put in a place, in a prison, without reason.
For 10 years;
imagine this!” she swipes.
Although the situation of migrants of other nationalities who remain in detention is not equally clear, due to the difficulty of monitoring and because Cairo does not disseminate information on the matter, Tesfay assures that in the Al Qanater prison he met at least five migrants of at least two other countries, Ivory Coast and Chad, from whom he has zero expectations that they will ever get out alive.
Those who were less lucky than Tesfay were the 15 migrants deported on October 31 and November 18.
Reacting to his case, on November 19 a group of UN experts expressed in a statement its deep concern about the forced return of the last seven deportees, warning that those who flee Eritrea and are returned “are considered traitors and are often detained at their arrival, interrogated, tortured, held in extremely punitive conditions and disappeared”.
I was in jail for 10 years and I didn't even know why, there was no case, no prosecutor, no mosque, no church, no reason
Tesfai, an Eritrean citizen held in Egypt
Turning a deaf ear, in December the Egyptian authorities transferred 53 asylum seekers, including more than seven minors, from their detention center in Aswan to the Cairo governorate, in order to present them to the Eritrean embassy and process their documents. of travel, necessary to start their deportation, as documented by the PRE.
On the 24th of the same month, they proceeded to deport 24 more people, including children, to Asmara, most of whom were not among the previous 53.
On February 8, the authorities transferred another group of 21 detainees to the Cairo governorate to repeat the process with the Eritrean embassy, according to the PRE source.
The group was later returned to a detention center under threat of imminent expulsion.
“We are unable to document and account for the total number of people who have been issued travel documents,” the source notes, “and we assume that those at risk of forcible deportation is greater than what we have documented.”
On March 16 and 17, another 31 Eritrean asylum seekers, including five women, six newborns and two underage girls, were forcibly deported to Asmara, according to what the PRE has been able to document.
Dozens more have been transferred during this same period from Aswan to Cairo to prepare for their deportation.
"UNHCR remains concerned about the deportation of any refugee and asylum seeker of all nationalities, especially in recent times with the case of Eritreans, which included children," they point out from the agency's office in Cairo.
“[We continue] to advocate with the authorities for access to detained refugees and asylum seekers of all nationalities, as well as helping to provide legal advice and support when we are granted access,” they add.
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