CAIRO: Egypt’s Assistant Foreign Minister for Human Rights Wael Abu al-Majd said that Egypt has become a significant transit country for migrants, particularly with regard to trafficking in human beings, where Egypt receives annually “large numbers of girls from Eastern Europe and also from Africa who come to Egypt in order to infiltrate into Israel.”Abul-Magd stressed last week at an international conference organized by the National Council for Human Rights on “Egypt .. and the migration,” that the government alone is not capable of dealing with the transit phenomenon and “there must be concerted efforts both with the participation of businessmen or civil society organizations as well as the role of the media to eliminate this problem through the distribution of roles and responsibilities.”
The assistant foreign minister said that the law on trafficking in human beings, adopted by Parliament last month, “cannot cope alone with the problem of trafficking in human beings, but there must be some authorities and apparatus within the state to learn the dimensions of this crime and to be trained on how to deal with it, as well as to develop a national integrated plan on how to deal with this phenomenon regardless of criminalization and punishment.”
He argued that the new law on trafficking in human beings, which is involved in the preparation of humanitarian law that elevates the interests of victims and set up a fund to care for victims of refugees.
Abu al-Majd noted the shooting of African “infiltrators” to Israel through the Egyptian border.
“They violate laws on a daily basis and there are mafias and gangs of armed men who take the initiative and always shoot Egyptian soldiers at night and try to flee to Israel,” he said.
He added that 14 Egyptian troops were killed and 60 “infiltrators” were killed by those armed groups.
Hafez Abu Saada, the Chairman of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), asked the participants of the conference to bring the recommendation to Egypt “to demand the government to remove its reservations to the Refugee Convention and the integration of the international legislation, which has been ratified by Egypt in this regard in the legislative structure in Egypt.”
He noted that the Egyptian government arrests arbitrarily African migrants in different areas and “is a particularly egregious violation of human rights and requires the existence of a law on how to deal with refugees and educate police officers who do not know anything about the conventions on the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers.”
BM
Egypt is transit for human trafficking - Bikya Masr
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