With the still raging COVID-19 pandemic, Eritrean political detainees face an even larger risk within prisons. In 2001, twenty-eight people were detained for voicing their opinions within an open letter to President Afwerki, including journalists writing about the issue. Most individuals have not been seen since that time. They were detained without being charged with a specific offense or holding a trial.
This trend of silencing opposing voices has continued into the hundreds over the last 19 years. They are termed “prisoners of conscience” because they only intended to tell their perspective on an issue and later are not heard from again. Many have done nothing but exercise their right to free speech, but that is still enough for them to be held in detention centers. This era of repression prohibits any critique of the government and forces many to try to flee the country for their own well being. Individuals who are detained face “appalling conditions and treatment” as well as being “held incommunicado.” The lack of communication with the families of imprisoned individuals stimulates more and more fear in their families who do not know if they will see their loved ones again. Those 28 people from the notorious 2001 event have not been released along with many others that followed.
A diaspora group called “One Day Seyoum” fights for the release of the prisoners of conscience. Their goal is to allow Eritrean to have a voice amid the harsh authoritarian government. Although they have been fighting for the rights of those detainees for years, they have a rejuvenated focus with the continuously spreading COVID-19 pandemic. The appalling conditions of the camps are petri dishes for potential coronavirus cases. Specifically, “unsanitary and inhumane conditions of detention in many countries place detainees at an especially high risk for contracting the disease.” Proper conditions must be made available in those detention centers where prisoners of conscience are being held or they must be released. The easier of the two would be a release of these individuals, especially considering the overcrowded centers and the lack of medical care provided inside of them. The government should offer “the same standards of health care as are available to everyone in the community, including access to testing, prevention and treatment of COVID-19,” according to Amnesty International. The past 1 to 18 years have been stolen from these detainees, and they must be released to the safety of their homes. Too much has been taken from these individuals in inhumanitarian ways for them to be at a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19 under the nose of the Eritrean government.
Blog post by Caroline Bukowski, Assistant Director, UNHRC
Sources:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/eritrea-should-end-18-years-darkness
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/02/covid-19-threat-eritrea-should-release-political-detainees
The Economic and Social Council Blog 
Hello everyone, my name is Andrés Puerto, and I am representing the delegation of Iraq. I am very excited about tomorrow’s conference.
Certainly, the situation regarding freedom of expression is an issue that deserves discussion on UNHRC. It is unacceptable that all the information media in Eritrea are regulated by the government, meaning that only what they want to be reported is reported, to the point of punishing journalists who criticize the government. And then they dare to say that there’s freedom of speech while they are in the 178th place in the World Press Freedom Chart. Speaking and expressing yourself and your opinions should not be regulated, it is a vital part of building a society. Even worse, another issue that concerns the delegation of Iraq, it’s what happens when they send you to a detention center. The conditions of living in those centers are inhumane and inefficient. And with the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s no infrastructure, personnel or security measures for regulating the situation in these centers. Our goal as a committee is to ensure human rights, and that these repeated occurrences in Eritrea are intolerable.
See you guys tomorrow, and can’t wait to work with you.
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