“South Sudan’s human rights record is appalling,” said Jehanne Henry, Senior Associate Africa Director at Human Rights Watch. The report underlines how the national security service has become especially abusive in the last five years, arbitrarily detaining people without any legal charges, often for long periods and collaborating with neighbouring countries to forcibly disappear activists, she said.
At least 47 accounts of people who had been arbitrarily arrested, detained or subjected to torture and inhuman treatment were brought to the fore between December 2013 and late 2018.
“There is a climate of fear surrounding the activities of the national security services which denies any possibility of freedom of expression or activity for a critical civil society,” Andrew Clapham, a commission member and law professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva told The Associated Press.
However South Sudan’s minister of information Michael Makuei dismissed the findings and said they were “clearly orchestrated to tarnish the image of the government.” He said the finding that South Sudan was like a police state was “unfortunate” and something said by organizations who want to disrupt the implementation of the peace agreement.
