Minister of Human Rights Horia Mashhoor said the reconciliation government is planning to sign an international agreement with regard to political prisoners. The agreement is meant as an official bid to cast serious importance on this issue, taking into consideration hundreds of revolutionary detainees whose fates are thus far unknown, based on reports and lists received by the Interior Ministry.

Hymayia (Protection)  Organization, in cooperation with the General Assembly of the revolutionary detainees, held a seminar Thursday titled, “Yemen's Revolutionary Detainees, Unknown Fate, and Waiting for Justice.” During the seminar, Mashhoor said the ministry will continue looking for detainees who are compulsorily held because of their political views and support for the revolution; the search will go on until they are found and released, in addition to investigating torture offenses they sustained and referring the perpetrators to the courts.  

Mashhoor said she considered the intelligence offices’ and the security apparatuses' denial of holding detainees as false, indicating that some detainees were released, though these offices denied their detention.   

Some of the released detainees visited her, she said, and described their ordeal in prison, particularly the cruelty of the crimes committed against them by the former regime; some became mentally unstable.

For his part, Dr. Abdusalam Ahmed, a representative of the U.N. High Commission, said the commission intends to open an office in Yemen, hoping the Yemeni government would improve the country’s humanitarian situation. He called for the General Assembly of the revolutionary detainees and the Protection Organization to continue their efforts pursuing the issue of the missing detainees.


Suppressing the revolution through compulsory confinement

Ismael Al-Dailami, a lawyer, said the main purpose of the compulsory confinement is to clamp down on the revolution and to create intimidation in the hearts of the revolutionaries.

He said the way to stop compulsory confinement is to have a neutral judiciary, rule of law and implementation of the international agreement for saving individuals from compulsory confinement.

Dr. Abdullah Al-Shaleef, head of the Raqeeb Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, said compulsory confinement is a compound crime because it violates a cluster of human rights. This kind of crime has been ascribed to despotic regimes, particularly military ones, according to Al-Shaleef.

He said compulsory confinement rose in Yemen during pre-Reunification due to the common racial and partisan disputes at that time; it spread notably following the Nasserite coup attempt in the north of Yemen; the destiny of many remains unknown.

Compulsory confinement cases have been on the rise since the breakout of the youth revolution, Al-Shaleef said, adding that former President Ali Abdullah Saleh's regime strived to foil the revolution via abductions and confinement of revolutionary youth.


Warning against veiling the mass massacres

Abdulkareem Tha'abal, head of the General Assembly of the Revolution Detainees, warned the 'regime remnants' against manipulating the detainees for the purpose of their narrow self-interests and making them the scapegoats of their criminal plots.

He expressed worry that some security and military figures loyal to the former president would attempt to obscure the crimes committed against the youth, whose fates remain unknown to this day.