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Fears are growing for the safety and wellbeing of Malak al-Kashef, a transgender woman seized during a police raid from her home in Giza in the early hours of 6 March and who has not been heard from since, Amnesty International said. Malak al-Kashef was taken by police to an undisclosed location. Her lawyers have not been able to locate her and police stations have denied she is in their custody.

Egyptian authorities have a horrific track record of persecuting people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity

Amnesty International believes that Malak’s arrest relates to her calls for peaceful protests following a major train crash in Cairo’s central train station on 27 February that killed at least 25 people. “Malak al-Kashef appears to have been detained solely for peacefully exercising her rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly

As many as 13,000 people were hanged in five years at a notorious Syrian government prison near Damascus, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, accusing the government of a "policy of extermination".Titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison," Amnesty's damning report is based on interviews with 84 witnesses, including guards, detainees, and judges.

victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government.

"They kept them (hanging) there for 10 to 15 minutes," a former judge who witnessed the executions said."For the young ones, their weight wouldn't kill them. The officers' assistants would pull them down and break their necks," he said.

A law granting amnesty to thousands of people linked to former President Zinedine Ben Ali has sparked outrage with critics saying it whitewashes corruption. But, despite protests in parliament and on the streets, the ruling coalition is sticking to its guns.

President Beji Caid Essebsi's ruling party has been pushing the reconciliation law since 2015, arguing it will improve the investment climate and help reviveTunisia's ailing economy. "I don't understand what all the fuss is about," says Labidi, arguing that it fills a legal loophole in Tunisia's 2013 Transitional Justice Law.

many civil society leaders fear the law will whitewash the entrenched corruption that fuelled the public anger behind the 2011 Arab Spring. "This reconciliation bill is a set back to freedom and liberty in Tunisia," Amine Allouche, a member of parliamentary watchdog Bawsala told RFI.

an old script used by Tunisian rulers since the country’s independence in 1956 that pits identity against class, cultural modernization against social justice. Women’s rights — rather than gender equality or sexual freedom — historically played a central role in Tunisian government’s effort to showcase the country as modern and forward-looking. But women’s rights have always been left to the president’s discretion. State-led feminism has contributed to the stifling of grass-roots women’s movements. And women engaging in associations that did not fall in the rubric of good secular state feminism were harassed and tortured.

the law is widely perceived as a means for Essebi’s political party, Nida Tounes, to “pay back” the business leaders that supported its campaign in 2014

Another important site where the identity and class divide is made obsolete is civil society itself. The social movement Manich Msamah (I will not forgive) — which mobilized and organized against the various drafts of the amnesty bill since 2015 — is composed of young Tunisians who share a common interest in social justice, but hold very different attitudes toward religion and marked by significant political disagreements. However, movements like Manich Msamah and civil society organizations have successfully turned into platforms for reciprocal learning, where calls for dignity, social justice and rule of law take precedence over the old narrative opposing class and identity.

The white iPhone with chipped paint that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to stay in contact with his sources also allowed his government to spy on him.They could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment.

Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by “network injection,” a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. The browser then redirects to the intended website and the user is none the wiser.

While Amnesty could not definitively state that the Moroccan authorities were behind the attack, the group was able to use forensic evidence to conclude this was very likely the case.

“in 2015, authorities detained two groups of foreign journalists attempting to report on the treatment of migrant workers in the country.”

Two other German journalists were detained in 2013 after filming the working conditions of migrant labourers.

All the newspapers printed in Qatar are owned by members of the ruling family or others closely connected with the government.

Despite Tunisia’s history of worker militancy under the more than 70-year-old Tunisian General Labor Union, Interior Ministry laws from prerevolution Tunisia read that police and other internal security services—which fall under the authority of the Interior Ministry—are not allowed to form professional unions, nor to strike. So as the post-Ben Ali era witnessed a blossoming of civil society, the creation of countless nongovernmental organizations, and the spread of public debate, internal security employees took advantage of the newfound opening to create unions

“The regimes [prior to and after the revolution] used us. They want to put all the blame for abuses on us,” he said. “Before, it was oppression. Anyone of us could be fired for any reason. The station chief could say, ‘Hand me your badge and pistol and get out.’ So we demanded union rights, and we demanded that our colleagues who’d been dismissed for technical reasons—of course not those who stole or kidnapped—are brought back.”

Many Tunisians, from ordinary citizens to politicians to human rights workers, say that the security unions often protect the interests of the security state embodied in the Interior Ministry and protect their members from accountability for past and ongoing abuses, including murder. The portrait that emerges is of a security sector that has managed to precisely use Tunisia’s newfound liberal freedoms to entrench its own authoritarian power—to turn the power of the Tunisian revolution against itself.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has rolled the dice with a US$ 374 million bid to acquire storied British soccer club Newcastle United. If approved by Britain’s Premier League that nominally maintains a high bar for the qualification of aspiring club owners, Prince Mohammed would have demonstrated that he has put behind him an image tarnished by Saudi conduct of a five-year long war in Yemen, the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, systematic abuse of human rights and, more recently, the kingdom’s badly-timed oil price war with Russia.

the kind of financial muscle that allows it to acquire trophies that enable it to project itself in a different light and garner soft power rather than financial gain at a time of a pandemic and global economic collapse.

Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, was reported to be talking to banks about a US$10 billion loan to help finance its acquisition of a 70% stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC). The deal would pour money into the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.

Last week, two bloggers were detained and are facing several criminal charges of "insulting state officials", "causing disturbances to the public" and defamation. They have been charged for posting videos on social media alleging that the government has failed to provide adequate compensation to people struggling financially and address shortage of basic food supplies in the market amid COVID-19 pandemic.

Within the region, Tunisia enjoys a relatively high degree of political freedom. However, the past two years have seen a number of criminal prosecutions related to freedom of expression – many of which have used outdated laws from the era of ousted President Ben-Ali to prosecute critics for defamation and insulting state officials and institutions.

On 13 April, blogger Anis Mabrouki posted a video on his Facebook page showing a crowd of people standing in front of the building of the closed mayor's office in Tebourba (a town 30 km from the capital Tunis), demanding financial aid which had been promised by the government amid the COVID-19 lockdown. The next day he received a summons letter from the authorities after the mayor pressed charges against him.

“They just want to see your visa,” a British embassy official told me on March 18, passing on a message from Egyptian security officials at the country’s visa and immigration office. I knew what that meant: Other journalists had been called to the same authority to have their visas revoked. Later that day, the British official called me again as I sheltered in a hotel room, after a lawyer advised me to flee my apartment in case it was raided by police. The security services had spoken to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had passed a second message to the British embassy. “They’re asking you to leave,”

I dodged the meeting at the visa authority by sending a lawyer in my place, after officials at the German embassy in Cairo—I’m a dual national—warned me I could be arrested or deported there. We think it’s best you get on a plane, they said. 

I’d reported for the Guardian that Egypt likely had more coronavirus infections than the country’s official total

The Doha Industrial Area, already infamous for slum conditions and overcrowded camps, is now under strict police monitoring and effectively sealed off. The area mostly hosts workers building infrastructure for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, who even before the pandemic faced poor conditions and unsafe workspaces. The Qatari government has denied the allegations, but they’re part of a pattern of abuse of migrant workers not just in Qatar but across the Middle East—workers who are now dangerously exposed to the vagaries of authoritarian governments during the pandemic.

The oil-rich Middle East countries built their fortresses with the blood and sweat of foreign laborers, but during the pandemic the workers, who live in crowded dormitories, are seen as a source of infection.

1.5 million Nepalis work in the Persian Gulf and Malaysia, and 400,000 in Qatar. Most of the Nepali workers are stuck abroad due to Nepal’s closure of its borders until April 30, leaving them highly vulnerable—although foreign governments have forced Nepal to accept some flights of deportees.

Kuwait's constitutional court Wednesday overturned a law that criminalises "imitation of the opposite sex" in a move Amnesty International said was a breakthrough for transgender rights in the region.  Kuwaiti lawyer Ali al-Aryan, who filed a lawsuit to overturn Article 198 of the penal code two years ago, confirmed that the law had been overturned, saying it violated personal freedoms, which are stipulated in the constitution. 

After years of failed appeals, Samia and the human rights society are gearing up to face the Saudi Supreme Court which, according to Amnesty International's Saudi Arabia researcher Dina el-Mamoun, will be a tough battle. "It's difficult to win these cases because there are no clear guidelines in terms of what they have to prove. The judges have huge discretion in relation to these cases. The outcome really depends on which judge gets the case and who rules on it," says Ms Mamoun. Samia's case is not a one off. Across the oil-rich desert kingdom, dozens of women are taking guardianship grievances to court. And they are gaining public support. "I think in terms of public opinion, you do see a lot of sympathy with these women," says Ms Mamoun. Samia, now 43, is still clinging to her childhood dream of having a family. Her special man, she says, is waiting for her and fighting bravely alongside her.

While the economic crisis related to the fall of oil revenues has caused political and social tensions, the Algerian authorities are showing increasing intolerance towards criticism, already under attack since the start of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s fourth term in April 2014.

Hassina Oussedik, director of Amnesty International’s chapter in Algeria, says the attacks on freedom of expression have been "constant". "In 2015, not a month has passed without witnessing cases of people being oppressed as they try to express themselves peacefully. The authorities rely on poorly formulated or ambiguous laws to arrest people," she told Middle East Eye. "They use provisions of the penal code that criminalise 'contempt', 'insult' or 'defamation' aimed against representatives of the state and other institutions in order to restrict freedom of expression, including humour, expression on the internet and on the street."

But an Algerian police officer, in charge of monitoring public demonstrations, said claims of repression were excessive and defended his activities."Repression? Dictatorship? Censorship? All of this is much exaggerated and is far from the truth," he told MEE. "If we did not do our job of monitoring and surveillance, Islamists and terrorists would feel omnipotent. In the 90s, this led us to chaos! Is it normal to insult the state, the president, the police or the army with impunity?"