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STOP THE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE IN ERITREA

STOP HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND SLAVERY

We are deeply concerned about the humanitarian crisis that has developed in Eritrea and have the moral obligation to be the voice for the voiceless.

For over two decades, Eritrea has been ruled by a brutal regime that subjects the people to untold suffering through a totalitarian system. Thousands disappear, languish and die in numerous prisons, metal shipping containers and underground cells while, according to Amnesty International, under ?atrocious conditions?. Others remain in indefinite servitude in a ?national service? program which, according to Human Rights Watch, is ?forced labor? or slavery. The USCIRF has also been calling for economic measures against the mining companies that are providing funds to the regime to continue to perpetrate its gross human rights violations and religious persecution.

Honorable Representative, the people of Eritrea have very little options but to endure this oppression. Those who manage to escape, dodging bullets through the regime?s ?shoot to kill? policy along the borders, find themselves in dangerous refugee camps throughout the region where criminal gangs and human traffickers prey upon them. Thousands have trekked through the Sudan, the Sahara Desert, Libya, and Egypt looking for safety and protection only to be met, according to Father Musie Zerai, with horrendous prisons in Libya and with detention camps in the Sinai Desert where they endure severe beatings, rape and torture in the hands of human traffickers. A CNN report in 2011 exposed a horrific account, including evidence of organ harvesting. And, a U.N. panel of experts, the Somalia Eritrea Monitoring Group, found high-level officials of the regime in Eritrea complicit in, if not profiteering from, human trafficking.

These conditions are unacceptable. The Eritrean people have already gone through over a century of brutality under successive colonial regimes and, after having achieved their hard won independence, they remain in bondage today under a cruel regime whose brutality is unmatched by any of the previous colonial regimes. A recent report of the UNCHR Special Rapporteur for Eritrea called for the international community to put the regime in ?Eritrea under close scrutiny until meaningful change is evident? for its blatant disrespect for human rights.

We appeal to you to call for further U.S. and international actions to compel the regime in Eritrea to implement the constitution, release all prisoners of conscience, and comply with its human rights obligations. We ask of you to call for justice for the people of Eritrea including for the ICC to look into bringing those who are responsible for these crimes against humanity to justice.



Thank you and God bless America.