Rasd Coalition documents over 16,000 arrests and abductions in Yemen

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September Net

On the sidelines of the 42nd session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, the Yemeni Coalition for Monitoring Human Rights Violations (Rasd) organized a symposium Thursday on arbitrary detention in Yemen, the report of a panel of eminent experts and UN resolutions on Yemen, particularly resolution 2216.

In his paper, human rights activist Basim Al-Absi pointed to the arbitrary arrests carried out by the Houthi rebel militia since its coup against legitimacy in September 2014, which affected a number of politicians, human rights activists, journalists, media, women and children for political, sectarian, religious and regional reasons.

He explained that Rasd Coalition  has documented about 16565 cases of arrest and abduction, including 368 children and 98 women 385 elderly during the period from September 2104 to December 2018. The secretariat of the capital Sana’a received the largest share in the number of detainees reached 2599 detainees followed by Sana’a province by 2223 and Taiz by 1425 detainees, topped Houthi militia list of arrest and kidnapping.

In his paper presented at the symposium entitled “The UN between Standards and Reality”, the human rights activist Khaled Abdulkarim reviewed the activities of some UN organizations and affiliated bodies in Yemen that provide Houthi militia support directly or indirectly, such as UNDP delivered Houthi rebel militia 20 vehicles.

The Houthis justify that it will facilitate the efforts of demining, while those who plant mines do not care to remove them, but to claim more victims. He Considers that a serious disregard for the lives of Yemenis and that cars will be used by militias Houthi to fight Yemenis.

Abdulkarim explained that the team of experts, has departed from the tasks entrusted to him to monitor and investigate all violations to all parties since September 2014, pointing out that the team ignored the essence of the conflict is the onslaught of Houthi militias on the legitimately elected authority, and launched a war to control all Yemeni provinces.

The war resulted in the killing of human beings, shattering of institutions and infrastructure, social, economic and development life, it also caused the threat of regional and international security.

For his part, human rights activist Murad al-Gharati described the report of the panel of experts as “questionable” and impartial for the inability of the team to access information from within Yemen and the absence of key parties to the conflict that can provide or confirm the information.

He pointed out that the testimonies on which the report was based are inaccurate as they came from people outside Yemen.

“The scale and incidence of violations cannot be measured on individual, symbolic patterns, outside the sites of violations or outside Yemen, where field monitoring and verification should be carried out directly from the sites and based on the testimony of victims and witnesses,” he said.

At the seminar, Al-Garati reviewed a number of errors in the report of the expert group and ignored the physical violations committed against civilians in Yemen. He pointed out that the report did not address what happened in Al-Jawf and Marib of shelling by Houthi and mine victims, and the siege of the militia for more than four years to the city of Taiz.

 

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