Eritrea Wire

Egypt released more than three dozen prisoners on Sunday, a week before the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which is typically a time of amnesty, a political party and state-run media said.

Political activists and family members confirmed several high-profile detainees were freed.

The Reform and Development Party said those freed had been political prisoners being held in pre-trial detention. The English edition of the state-run newspaper Al-Ahram said 41 prisoners in all were released.

The government’s human rights body said in a statement only that there had been a release of individuals held in pre-trial detention but gave no details.

The move came a week before the Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan. It is typically a time when prisoners are released on presidential pardons, but the number of those freed was one of the largest in recent years. Thousands of political prisoners, however, are estimated to remain inside Egypt’s jails, many without trial.

Among the released was political activist Waleed Shawky, his wife, Heba Anees, said on social media. She posted a picture of the couple hugging.

Journalist Mohamed Salah was also released, activist Esraa Abdel Fattah said. And Nabeh Elganadi, a human rights lawyer, posted a picture with Radwa Mohamed, who was arrested after making videos posted on social media criticizing President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

Under broad counterterrorism laws, Egypt’s state prosecutors have often used vague charges to renew 15-day pretrial detention periods for months or years, often with little evidence.

On Sunday, Sanaa Seif, the sister of one of Egypt’s most high-profile detained activists, Alaa Abdel Fattah, said her brother had faced new ill-treatment in prison and he was on the 22th day of a hunger strike.

Meanwhile, new arrests are still taking place. On Saturday, the human rights lawyer Khaled Ali said several men in the country’s south had been arrested and accused of spreading lies after they sung a song about rising food prices in a video posted online.

The government of el-Sissi — a U.S. ally with deep economic ties to European countries — has been relentlessly silencing dissenters and clamping down on independent organizations for years with arrests, detentions and jail sentences, and other restrictions.

Many of the top activists involved in the 2011 uprising in Egypt are now in prison, most of them arrested under a draconian law passed in 2013 that effectively bans all street protests.

Source: Voice of America

Eritrean Ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan, Mr. Yohannes Teklemicael met and held talks with Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Housing, Land, and Public Utilities, and Minister of Education-Central Equateri State of the Republic of South Sudan.

At a meeting held on 20 April, Ambassador Yohannes Teklemicael and Mr. Mayiik Ayii Deng, Minister of Foreign Affairs of South Sudan, talked on strengthening bilateral ties as well as regional development and integration.

Underlining on the significance of regional integration in the peaceful development and prosperity of our region Ambassador Yohannes called on the countries in the region to play due role to that end.

Mr. Mayiik Ayii Deng, Minister of Foreign Affairs of South Sudan on his part commending commended the support the people and Government of Eritrea are extending to the people and Government of South Sudan expressed his country’s readiness to develop the bilateral brotherly relation toward economic integration and relationship.

In related news, Ambassador Yohannes met with Ms. Flora Gebriel Lora, Minister of Housing, Land, and Public Utilities of South Sudan on 21 April and discussed on issues of mutual interest as well as on the activities of the Eritrean community in South Sudan.

Commending the role of the Eritrean community in the reconstruction and economic development of South Sudan, Ms. Flora expressed conviction to meet the demands of the Eritrean in the country.

Ambassador Yohannes also had similar discussion with Mr. Cristo Zakaria Lado, Minister of Education-Central Equateri State of the Republic of South Sudan.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

Veteran freedom fighter Andemariam Sebhatu (Beilul) passed away on 22 April at the age of 70 due to illness.

Veteran freedom fighter Andemariam Sebhatu who joined the Eritrean Liberation Popular Forces on 1975 served his country and people with dedication in various capacities during the armed struggle for independence including as reporter for Dimtsi Hafash as well as head of Information at the Southern and Eastern regions.

After independence, veteran freedom fighter Andemariam served as head of procurement as well as finance and budget at the Ministry of Information.

Veteran freedom fighter Andemariam is survived by his wife and four children.

The funeral service of veteran fighter Andemariam Sebhatu was conducted today, 23 April at noon at the Asmara Martyrs Cemetery.

Expressing deep sorrow in the passing away of veteran freedom fighter Andemariam Sebhatu, the Ministry of Information expresses condolences to family and friends.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

WASHINGTON — U.S. and Cuban officials met in Washington this week to discuss a record number of Cubans arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, and to determine whether Cuba is willing to start accepting Cuban deportees.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters the goal of the conversation was to promote safe and legal migration between the two countries, and to address the issue of returns and repatriation of citizens. U.S. officials released no further details.

Cuba’s foreign ministry released a statement reiterating Cuban concerns over U.S. measures that impede legal and orderly migration and insisting that the U.S. honor a commitment to issue 20,000 annual visas for Cubans to emigrate to the United States. That process was halted under the Trump administration.

Cuban officials said they emphasized there is no justification for the continued interruption of the visa service. Last month, the State Department said it would begin processing some visas for Cubans in Havana and start reducing the backlog created by a four-year hiatus.

Cuba has a history of not accepting people returned or deported from the United States, but Maria Cristina Garcia, migration analyst and professor at Cornell University, says the policy has shown a little flexibility over the years.

“You’ll recall that after the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, thousands of Cubans were detained indefinitely, across the United States, because Cuba refused to take them back. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the Castro regime began accepting a small number of these Cuban detainees.

Garcia said that in 2005, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the U.S. government had violated the law by indefinitely detaining “Mariel” Cubans who could not be deported because Cuba would not allow their return. More than 900 Mariel Cubans were released.

What is the deportation process?

During a process at an immigration court, deportation orders are usually issued after a foreign national violates the terms of their visa, is found to be undocumented or is convicted of a crime.

If the person is sentenced to prison for a crime, they may be deported after serving the sentence. If they are detained administratively for an immigration violation, they can be held for up to 180 days while federal officials try to obtain travel documents for deportation.

When the United States seeks to deport an immigrant, it generally follows a framework negotiated with the other nation; these are often detailed in writing, through a memorandum of understanding.

Countries that do not negotiate or do not follow these written agreements and refuse to accept their nationals back are deemed “recalcitrant” or “uncooperative.”

Before the United States can deport someone, the other country must agree to receive the deportee. There must also be an administratively final order of removal, or deportation order, and the individual must have a travel document issued by a foreign government.

What happens when a country does not want to accept their citizens with a U.S. order of removal?

“The way the law stands now, the State Department, which handles these things at this point, is supposed to continue its efforts to negotiate with either the country in question or a third country that might be willing to take some of these people off our hands,” David Abraham, professor of law emeritus at the University of Miami School of Law, told VOA.

But if it is not possible to send someone back to their home country or a third country willing to take them, Abraham said, they sit in detention while waiting for a review of their case to determine whether they are a danger to the community. Such a review can be conducted every six months.

And if they are found not a danger to the community, they can be released with an ankle bracelet or other kind of monitoring device along with a financial bond which is usually paid by U.S. relatives.

Is Cuba on the U.S. recalcitrant countries list?

A country is placed in the “uncooperative” or recalcitrant countries list if it refuses to allow U.S. removal flights into the country, or because it denies or delays the issuance of travel documents, such as passports.

During former president Barack Obama’s second term, 23 countries were categorized as “recalcitrant,” or “uncooperative” with deportations. Under Trump, the number decreased to nine.

Cuba was still on that list as of 2020. VOA asked Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) for an updated list of recalcitrant countries under the Biden administration, and the current number of Cubans facing deportation orders. Officials did not reply before publication.

In 2020, ICE officials told VOA in an email that Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Laos, Pakistan and Vietnam were on the list of recalcitrant countries.

ICE said its assessment of a country’s cooperativeness is formally reviewed twice a year; however, it can be revisited at any time as conditions in that country or relations with that country evolve. As a result, this list is subject to change as countries become more or less cooperative.

How many Cubans are arriving at U.S. borders?

In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data shows 32,396 encounters of Cuban migrants at the border. In October – the first month of fiscal year 2022 – that number was 6,067.

Cubans, who often arrive in the U.S. by illegally crossing the southern border, face a lower risk of being deported or expelled under title 42 — a public health authority that has been used to block asylum to thousands of migrants of other nationalities due to COVID-19.

According to CBP data, there were a total of 1,529 Cuban deportees in 2020. Of that number, 238 had criminal convictions and 1,291 were non-criminal.

Can Cubans with U.S. removal orders be dropped off at Cuban ports of entry?

No. In July 2016, former ICE Deputy Director Daniel Ragsdale explained to Congress a protocol must be followed to deport a foreign national.

What happens to those with deportation orders in the U.S. but who are released from immigration detention?

David Abraham, University of Miami professor of law emeritus, said the State Department is “obligated to do its best to find somewhere to take [foreign nationals] either [to their] home country or another country that we can persuade.”

If the issuance of travel documents fails and people are released from immigration detention, Abraham said that depending on the terms of someone’s bond, they might be allowed to work.

“[Or] you may find that you can only work in the shadow economy where no one is asking you for a social security number … But yes, it’s a bad position to be in,” he said.

Source: Voice of America

By Cameron Hudson April 22, 2022 News broke last week that the Biden administration’s Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, David Satterfield, was leaving his position after only three months on the job. This early exit comes on the heels of the administration’s first Horn Envoy, Jeffrey Feltman, leaving the post in January, after less than a year on the job. These short tenures, in such rapid succession, raise questions about the direction of U.S. policy in this increasingly critical region at a moment of great inflection. They should also provoke some thinking about the role of envoys in the State Department and what needs to be done to set them up for success. When Secretary Antony Blinken announced the creation of a Horn of Africa envoy in April of last year, the decision was widely heralded both as being responsive to unfolding events on the ground, and as a hopeful signal that the Administration planned to think strategically about its own engagement and managing the entrance of new and influential actors in the region, from Russia to Gulf states. At the creation of the envoy position, the disastrous civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia; the unsteady democratic transition in Sudan; and escalating tensions between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam were all highlighted as areas of potential focus. The absence of an assistant secretary for Africa, along with other key gaps across the interagency in the early days of the administration, made the appointment of an envoy, which does not require the time-consuming vetting or Senate confirmation of other political appointees, an expedient way to quickly respond to the growing crises in the region. But by naming a Horn of Africa envoy, as opposed to separate envoys for Sudan and Ethiopia, the administration suggested that it saw the region as more than just a series of fires in need of extinguishing, but rather one of enormous strategic importance being put under strain by a host of, in the State Department’s own words, “interlinked political, security, and humanitarian crises.” The question then, as it is now, is how would the administration prioritize the competing aspects of such a broad portfolio? Only months before the Biden team took office, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) argued in a report on the Red Sea region, compiled by a senior study group that then soon-to-be Envoy Jeff Feltman sat on, for a more strategic approach, noting: “The transitions in Ethiopia and Sudan present an opportunity to set the region on a transformative new trajectory toward reform and stability, yet they also carry a risk of state failure that, given these states’ combined population of more than 150 million, would send a tidal wave of instability across Africa and the Middle East.” These trends, the report argued, required long-term commitments, a political and diplomatic strategy to address them cutting across the US interagency, and the appointment of a special envoy “charged with addressing the region’s complexity in an integrated way.” That both envoys were seasoned diplomats, heralding from the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, as opposed to the Africa Bureau reflected, again, a strategic understanding of the evolving influence the Arab world is having on the Horn of Africa and the need to leverage U.S. influence there to shape events in the Horn. However, viewed by the countries in the region, the appointment of Middle East experts was largely seen as the further subcontracting of U.S. foreign policy in the region to Gulf actors, continuing a trend that that started during the Trump Administration and reinforcing a sense of strategic disengagement from Washington. The fact that both envoys spent seemingly as much, if not more, time in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh, than in Khartoum or Addis Ababa, fed conspiracies in the Horn and suggested that, in practice, the United States could achieve its goals in the region through diplomatic horse trading rather than by building trust and relationships with African leaders. Nowhere has this been more the case than in Sudan, which has worked with eight U.S. special envoys to the country over the past 20 years and which is experiencing its own fraught transition away from military rule that the Biden team has repeatedly pledged to support. To that end, Feltman was in Khartoum on the eve of the military’s coup d’etat last October, trying to head it off by warning Sudanese military leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the consequences from Washington should he carry out a much-rumored impending coup only hours before it actually unfolded. The U.S. response, besides suspension of more than $700 million in development aid, was largely to isolate and deny legitimacy to the junta, which came in part through a suspension of dialogue with junta leaders. But as a result, in the nearly six months since the military seized back power, U.S. envoys have only spent roughly two days in the country. In that time, the military has moved to consolidate its hold on power by arresting opponents and killing protesters, reinstated key elements of the former regime, and undermined a United Nations-led political process intended to restore civilian government by threatening to expel the U.N.’s representative. Clearly, tradeoffs were made in favor of focusing on the dire humanitarian consequences of the conflict in neighboring Ethiopia, where as many as 500,000 people have already been killed and millions more risk famine and death as a result of a still-devastating humanitarian blockade. In Tigray, U.S. envoys appear to have played a more traditional and consistent role on the ground in building relations with the parties, engaging with regional partners, and calling in support from higher levels, like when President Joe Biden called Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy in January to press him to de-escalate. While the choice to prioritize urgent humanitarian concerns is understandable, the fact that such tradeoffs had to be made in the first place underscores a critical challenge of the regional envoy position. But absent a strategy for the region, which Congress has suggested and the administration has yet to produce, it is impossible to fully appreciate what the impacts of these tradeoffs in time and attention truly are on the region, and how to mitigate them. Nor have these tactical responses succeeded in managing the role of third-party states to these conflicts, like Eritrea’s ongoing role in committing atrocities in Tigray or Russia’s behind the scenes support to Sudan’s military leaders, both of whom remain bent on undermining the U.S. goal of stability there. But with this new vacancy in the envoy role comes a new opportunity for the administration to correct the recent shortcomings in its approach to this region and prepare the way for a new envoy, or envoys, to succeed where others have not thus far. A useful place to start would be implementing the recommendations of Princeton Lyman, himself a former Special Envoy to Sudan, who co-authored a report on special envoys in which he argued that there are three essential elements to effectively using special envoys: purpose, empowerment, and policy authority. >From a purpose perspective, defining why the United States needs a special envoy, what their mandate is, and what end state in the region they are hoping to achieve are all critical to setting expectations both internally, where turf battles can often emerge, and externally, in the countries that are the focus of the envoy’s work. Critically important, as Lyman’s contribution to USIP noted, “Developing [a Special Envoy’s] mandate can also be a valuable process for revealing and resolving serious policy differences that may exist within the administration.” Here, the Biden team has fallen short by neither defining for the region how it was going to prioritize the manifold and interlinked challenges in the portfolio nor by defining how the envoy would work within the State Department. A leaked email to Foreign Service staff by the assistant secretary for Africa last fall acknowledged “confusion and discontent about who is doing what in Ethiopia and Sudan” between the Africa Bureau and the envoy. Similarly, though the announcements of both Horn of Africa envoys were attributed to Blinken in written statements, neither envoy ever benefited from the needed boost that is seen as being able to speak on behalf of the Secretary of State, let alone the President – something foreign leaders are keen to gauge when assessing an envoy’s true importance. In a place like Sudan, which has seen so many envoys come and go, most of whom were seen as being close to successive Presidents, Biden’s Horn envoys never benefited from a meeting or photo opportunity with him. This might not mean much in Washington circles, but in a capital like Khartoum, which quietly bristled at the sense that Washington had dispatched a downgraded envoy, those optics can make or break U.S. diplomacy. Indeed, the more recent suggestion that part of the reason for Satterfield’s departure was “insufficient White House attention to the region” is consistent with the view that Horn envoys have been stymied by working through the lower-level assistant secretary for Africa, which the USIP report argued was more a way to “deflect congressional pressure” but ultimately “not effective enough to have the needed impact.” Lastly, whether they are leading the process or participating in it, envoys must be able to drive the policy process they are being asked to represent. It helps when the envoys are seen as having the seniority, expertise, and trust of their colleagues in the interagency, which may not have been entirely the case within an Africa Bureau bristling at seeming interlopers from the Near East Affairs Bureau. And things were surely not helped by reports that “the Department’s desk officers responsible for Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan will lead policy paper drafting on those crises, with the special envoy signing off on them,” suggesting that envoys were acting more as mouthpieces to countries where the U.S. still has no Senate-confirmed ambassadors in place. It remains to be seen how or if the administration is going to try to salvage its approach to the Horn of Africa. To be clear, the demand is still there as the region is no more stable and the threats no less worrying than at the start of the administration. And indeed, the administration’s initial instinct to view the region as interconnected was well reasoned. Taking that a step further, the State Department might instead decide to create a Horn of Africa office within the Africa Bureau to better support U.S. diplomatic efforts in the region, bring a strategic lens to those efforts, and signal a long-term approach to the Horn that is less dependent on individuals. Under such a scenario, the deputy assistant secretary for that region can often then be dual-hatted to serve in an envoy capacity when in the region and as a participant in the policy process when back in Washington. But if the administration chooses to replace the envoy, they must do it for the right reasons and empower that person accordingly with the necessary authority, access, and policy guidance to make a difference. Anything less is unfair to the people in this region the United States is seeking to help and will only further reinforce the feeling that Washington is phoning in its engagement, or, worse, subcontracting it to others. About the Author(s) Cameron Hudson * Cameron Hudson (@_HudsonC) is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center where his research focuses on the Horn of Africa.

Source: Dehai Eritrea Online