Human Rights Watch has expressed its concerned about the lack of news on the fate of human right lawyer Dong Samuel Luak and Aggrey Idri Izbon, both senior members of South Sudan’s armed opposition, who went missing from the Kenyan capital in January.
The two men are believed to have been abducted by or at the request of South Sudan officials and taken illegally to South Sudan, where they are likely to have been abused as the ones earlier detained.
In a statement issued on Monday, Human Rights Watch, said: “three months, 90 days, more than two thousand hours without news of Dong Samuel Luak, a well-known South Sudanese activist, and Aggrey Idris, an opposition official, who disappeared off the streets of Nairobi on January 23 and 24.”
The rights body said it has documented clear patterns of arbitrary detentions, abuse, and torture by military and national security actors in South Sudan.
According to Human Rights Watch, credible sources said both Luak and Idris were detained in the Juba headquarters of South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS) on January 26, two days after they were forcibly disappeared from Nairobi and a day before the High Court of Kenya ruled against their deportation.
It further said the sources indicated that the two men were held in the NSS headquarters in Juba for a few nights and then transferred elsewhere, the right group added that The two men’s current whereabouts remain unknown.
However, since their disappearance, neither the Kenyan nor South Sudanese authorities have responded to questions about the two men’s fate.
Days earlier, the South Sudanese minister of information, Michael Makuei, denied that they were in the custody of South Sudanese security forces.
“Luak and Idris’ forcible disappearance shows that South Sudanese actors are willing to cross borders to silence critics. This is an especially worrying development considering how many human rights activists and civil society leaders have had to flee South Sudan since the war started,” said the rights body.
Since the war started in South Sudan in 2013, the US-based Human Rights Watch said it has documented cases of enforced disappearances, defined as the detention and subsequent denial of detention by authorities, especially in the Equatoria and Western Bahr el-Ghazal regions where the South Sudan government has been pursuing abusive counterinsurgency campaigns, including against people presumed to support the opposition.
The rights group called upon the international actors, including the African Union and Kenya to ensure that South Sudan’s government immediately investigates the case, produce and release the disappeared men, and investigate and hold to account those responsible.