21 Facts About Alkarama

Alkarama is an independent Swiss-based human rights non-governmental organization established in 2004 to assist all those in the Arab World subjected to, or at risk of, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, and arbitrary detention.

Alkarama is an NGO defending the victims of human rights violations in the Arab world – including violations of the right to life, to physical and mental integrity, and to Civil and Political Rights – by using in priority international law mechanisms.

Alkarama helps to promote a culture of human rights in the Arab world.

Alkarama encourages States to strengthen their national laws to defend and promote human rights.

Finally, Alkarama contributes to the promotion of the culture of human rights, by ensuring that the various groups that make up the civil society in these countries are familiar with the concept of human rights and are mobilising around it, know their rights and claim them, and feel protected by law.

Related searches

Alkarama focuses on the most serious human rights violations, i e violations that relate to the right to life, human dignity, bodily integrity and freedom.

Alkarama has presented over 1,000 cases of disappearances to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

Alkarama was created as a Swiss association in July 2004 by Qatari and Algerian human rights defenders – Abdulrahman Al Naimi, Rachid Mesli and Abbas Aroua – to contribute to an Arab World where all individuals live free, in dignity, and protected by the rule of law.

In doing so, Alkarama would fulfill its objective to contribute to a better understanding of human rights and raise awareness of the UN's human rights protection mechanisms in the Arab civil society, including amongst social groups who often viewed these instruments as ineffective or understood rights as Western concepts, in particular Islamist groups, political opposition parties, and journalists.

In doing so, Alkarama provides the CAT and HRCttee expert, as well as members of the access to information from civil society actors as well as concrete cases of violations of numerous articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

In 2009, facing the increasingly negative roles played by National Human Rights Institutions, Alkarama begins providing independent information from local civil society actors about these institutions to the International Coordinating Committee on, which regularly reviews the status of these institutions, resulting in a number of reforms within these institutions.

Also in 2009, Alkarama launched the Alkarama Award for Human Rights Defenders, a symbolic reward attributed every year to an individual or organisation that has significantly contributed to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Arab world.

Alkarama today is made up of nine full-time employees in Geneva, and five representatives in the Arab World.

Alkarama is a trilingual organisation, publishing material in Arabic, English and French.

On 3 September, Commentary, a magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, accused Alkarama of being run by an "Al Qaeda financier", in reference to Alkarama's Founder, Mr Abdulrahman Al Naimi.

Current president of Alkarama's Board of Trustees, Khalifa al-Rabban, is a Founding Member and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign alongside Abdulrahman Al Naimi.

Dr Dhina returned to Alkarama after having spent almost 6 months at the Prison de la Sante in Paris.

However, the Alkarama Council decided to reject the resignation of Mr Al Naimi after initially accepting it.

Me Rachid Mesli, Legal Director at Alkarama, was arrested at the Swiss-Italian border on 19 August 2015 on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by the Algerian authorities in April 2002, which claims that he had "provided telephone information to terrorist groups movements, " and "attempted to supply terrorist groups with cameras and phones, " twisting his work as a human rights lawyer, in constant contact with victims of human rights abuses and their families.

US Treasury claimed that in the early 2000s, when Alkarama released its advocacy report, Ibrahim Issa al-Bakr was “working to raise money to support terrorism” and was involved in a jihadist network.

In 2009, Alkarama submitted Kuwari's case to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.