Amnesty International (AI), a global movement that campaigns to end abuses of human rights, over the weekend called on the South Sudanese authorities to expeditiously clarify the fate and whereabouts of Morris Mabior Awikjok Bak.
Mabior, a political and human rights activist who has been seeking asylum in Kenya since 2021, was picked up from his home in Nairobi on 4 February by men in Kenya Police uniform accompanied by a South Sudanese national.
His wife, Angelina Aliet Marol, who was with him at the time of his arrest told Radio Tamazuj that the armed men came into their house, ransacked it, and allegedly seized their phones, laptops, and other valuables before handcuffing her husband and shoving him into a car.
Responding to Saturday’s petition by the Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) to the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) to try and establish the fate and whereabouts of Mabior, a critic of the South Sudanese government who was reportedly arbitrarily arrested or unlawfully abducted in Kenya, forcefully returned and allegedly detained in South Sudan this month, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for East and Southern Africa Flavia Mwangovya tasked the government to come clean about his whereabouts.
“We applaud PALU’s efforts seeking, through the EACJ, to clarify the fate and whereabouts of Mabior, a South Sudanese man who attempted to seek refuge in Kenya in 2021. We call on the South Sudanese authorities to, without further delay, clarify the fate and whereabouts of Morris Mabior Awikjok Bak,” she charged. “What happened to Morris Mabior Awikjok Bak matches a broader pattern of abductions and illegal transfers of South Sudanese refugees from neighboring countries by South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS).”
“This case brings back haunting memories of the enforced disappearance in Kenya and alleged extrajudicial killings in South Sudan of South Sudanese human rights lawyer and activist Dong Samuel Luak, and Aggrey Ezbon Idri, a member of the political opposition,” she added.
According to Amnesty International, in addition to clarifying the fate and whereabouts of Mabior, the South Sudanese authorities must ensure he has regular access to his family, a lawyer, and a doctor, and unless he is charged with an internationally recognizable offense, he should be immediately released.
According to the rights body, on 4 February, Mabior, a critic of the South Sudanese government and the Director General of the NSS’s Internal Security Bureau, was reportedly arbitrarily arrested or unlawfully abducted, allegedly by armed Kenyan security forces, and a South Sudanese man and Kenyan woman in civilian clothes, in Nairobi, Kenya, where he resides. It is believed he was forcefully returned to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and is being held in incommunicado detention at a National Security Service detention facility.
“The NSS operates a spy network that extends throughout East Africa where many South Sudanese have found refuge,” the AI statement said.
“Since January 2017, at least four South Sudanese men, three of whom were refugees and under Kenya’s protection, were illegally picked up and transferred back to South Sudan where they were held in prolonged detention in the NSS’s detention facility known as the Blue House. Two of them were allegedly extra-judicially killed.”
AI said that since the NSS Act in 2014, the NSS has accumulated unchecked powers, becoming one of the main perpetrators of human rights violations and the most powerful security actor in South Sudan.