A lawyer investigating the murder of an Italian student in Egypt is facing prosecution and up to five years in prison after being forcibly disappeared at Cairo airport. Ebrahim Metwally Hegazy disappeared on Sunday while travelling to a session of the UN working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances in Geneva. He reappeared before prosecutors on Tuesday evening charged with “managing an illegal group, spreading false news … [and] cooperating with foreign organisations”.

Metwally represents families of people forcibly disappeared by the Egyptian state – when a person is secretly arrested and held in an unknown location without access to legal services – after his son disappeared in 2013 while working for the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, a Cairo-based NGO. ECRF lawyers have acted as the legal counsel of Giulio Regeni’s family in Egypt after the Cambridge University student disappeared on 25 January 2016. His body was found on an outlying Cairo desert road bearing signs of extreme torture. Mohamed Lotfy, the head of ECRF, said: “Ebrahim had intended to speak [at the conference] about his son and deaths in custody following disappearance. He was going to speak about the Regeni case as the iconic example of this.”(theguardian)…[+]

An official watchdog has issued a fresh warning over the police’s use of more than 20m facial images on their searchable databases, more than five years after the courts ruled that the inclusion of images of innocent people was unlawful. Paul Wiles, the biometrics commissioner, says in his annual report that the police’s use of facial images has gone far beyond their original use for custody purposes and forces are using facial recognition software to try to identify individuals in public places.In one recent example, the Metropolitan police used facial imaging to check those attending the Notting Hill carnival against a force watchlist.

“Facial images are just the first in a new wave of biometrics. I am aware that the police are already experimenting with voice recognition technology and others such as iris, gait and vein analysis are commercially available,” says Wiles in his annual report published on Wednesday. He notes that while facial images have been used by the police since the birth of photography, the development of digital images, their storage on a national database, the use of powerful searching algorithms and the deployment of such technologies in public spaces transforms facial images into something new.

Wiles says that unlike DNA and fingerprints, images can be taken without the subject’s knowledge. Facial images of about 90% of the adult population already exist in passports and driving licences.(theguardian)…[+]

Scores of villages that were inhabited by Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority are now completely empty, a government spokesman has said. Of 471 villages targeted in “clearance operations” by the Burmese army since late August, 176 were now empty and at least 34 others partially abandoned, Zaw Htay said. The violent crackdown, launched in response to attacks by militants, has sent at least 370,000 Rohingya scrambling across the border to Bangladesh and prompted a barrage of criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader.The Nobel laureate had been due to attend the UN general assembly next week, but Zaw Htay said she would now skip the event.

“The first reason is because of the Rakhine terrorist attacks,” he said. “The second reason is there are people inciting riots in some areas … The third is that we are hearing that there will be terrorist attacks and we are trying to address this issue.” The second vice-president, Henry Van Tio, instead will represent Myanmar at the UN. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been criticised for blaming “terrorists” for what she called “a huge iceberg of misinformation” about the violence in recent weeks, will give a televised address in Myanmar next week that will cover the same topics she would have addressed at the UN. Last year, in her first speech to the UN general assembly as Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi won praise for pledging to uphold the rights of minorities.(theguardian)…[+]