EuroMed Rights supports the call put out by close to 200 human rights activists, researchers and artists in Algeria, who published a press release on Saturday 19 May denouncing the massive arrests and deportations that have taken place in the country since early 2018.
EuroMed Rights welcomes this initiative that is unprecedented in Algeria due to civil society being particularly compartmentalised and attacked on all sides by the authorities.
EuroMed Rights President, Michel Tubiana, declared:
“Together with our members in Algeria, our entire network condemns the widespread campaign of arbitrary arrests, forced removals to the borders, followed by mass and collective deportations, which affects all migrants from sub-Saharan Africa on the Algerian territory”.
EuroMed Rights welcomes the call put out yesterday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, demanding Algeria to put an immediate end to the deportation of those migrants. We are calling on the entire international community, including the European Union which is cooperating with Algeria on the migration issue, and the relevant UN organisations to react alongside EuroMed Rights. This is all the more urgent given that the Algerian authorities regularly assert that the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have been consulted during these illegal operations.
“In this context, we can only deplore the attitude of the Algerian Red Crescent which aims to discredit this mobilisation, in particular through its President who has condemned this collective call and denied that these thousands of men, women and children have been forced to leave the country”, concluded Michel Tubiana.