Press Release
The Committee for Justice (CFJ) has documented that Egyptian authorities have subjected five employees to enforced disappearance after they were dismissed from their jobs under Law 73 of 2021 (the Narcotics Law), which allows for the dismissal of employees who test positive for drug use in surprise tests.
Security forces arrested six employees at dawn on Sunday, October 13th, from their homes, following their participation in a conference held the previous day at the Conservative Party in support of workers dismissed under this law.
One of the detainees, Mohamed Youssef from Suez, was released the night before last, but the whereabouts of the remaining five employees are still unknown, with the police continuing to deny their detention.
The five missing employees are: Bayoumi Hassan Mostafa, Wael Ismail Zaki, Sayed Gharib Mostafa, Sameh Abdel-Alim Abdel-Hafez, and Hesham Shoukry Abdel-Mohsen.
It is worth mentioning that Amr Osman, Director of the Addiction and Substance Abuse Control Fund, stated in January 2023 that 1,000 employees in the government sector had been dismissed after testing positive for drug use based on reports from a specialized governmental committee. However, Fatma Fouad, the labor secretary for the Conservative Party, revealed in previous press statements that some of the dismissed employees had undergone independent tests later, and the results came back negative, raising the possibility of errors in the official drug test reports.
CFJ calls Egyptian authorities to reveal the fate of the disappeared employees and release them immediately, stressing that enforced disappearance constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights and reflects a serious and arbitrary escalation in the use of laws like Law 73 of 2021.
