Detainees, the world’s forgotten

As the UN’s top investigator into torture and punishment prepares to end his tenure later this year, he has chosen to focus on a group of people he considers to be the most vulnerable to discrimination and neglect. Detainees, says Professor Manfred Nowak, are the world’s ‘forgotten’.

The theme has become central to the Austrian professor’s six year tenure and in his report to the UN Human Rights Council this March, he reiterated his call for a convention to protect them. 
Where other forms of discrimination, by creed, conviction, gender or class, are seen being strongly countered by global social movements, the rights of those considered ‘criminal’ tend to generate less interest, and certainly less popular sympathy. There is a long-standing tolerance of prison systems that are closed and secretive in which exceptional measures may ‘need’ to be taken or procedures relaxed. The attitude has allowed standards to slip badly.  “As soon as they are behind bars, detainees lose most of their human rights and often are simply forgotten by the outside world,” Novak reported in Geneva in March, having repeatedly highlighted ‘appalling’ average conditions of detention that constitute ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’.

This is despite the commitment of 192 states to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its two binding covenants, much of which covers conditions of detention. As noted by the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in 2007, “Some rights are necessarily restricted by detention. But regardless of the reasons why they have been deprived of their liberty, individuals in detention are more vulnerable to human rights violations… Governments have the obligation to respect, protect and fulfill [these] rights.”

Yet the 71-page report recently released by Professor Nowak’s team cited experiences among detainees in Nigeria—who were penned in cells by the hundreds and tortured in front of one another—and in Nepal and Sri Lanka where cells were so crowded that prisoners could not lie down to sleep at the same time. On a mission in Uruguay he found that conditions were i nhuman for both inmates and guards in the maximum security Libertad Prison where small metal containers built for one would hold three, with barely any light or air, and no water or toilet. He was not singling out these countries for censure he insisted, but offering them as representative of the situation in most countries in the world at the moment.

Prison authorities commonly fail to provide inmates with the basics for survival: food, water, clothing, a toilet, medical care and a proper place to sleep. It is a responsibility, says Nowak, very often left to visiting family members. Some states go a step farther, however. In Burma for example, where the military junta still bars the Red Cross from its prisons, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has documented the routine placing of inmates in prisons hundreds of kilometers from their home towns, and therefore from any form of support. Nowak noted that those without help from the outside can die, or be forced to denigrate themselves by performing ‘services’ for prisoners or staff in exchange for provisions. The AHRC has documented the ‘trades’ that result from this set up in countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, in which goods from families are ‘taxed’ by police or prison guards. (These can be read about in AHRC/ALRC publications, among them ‘Use of police powers for profit’, article2, vol 8, no 1, March 2009).

In the Philippines, the question of detainees’ right to health was highlighted in 2008 and 2009 by the deaths of two remanded labour rights activists from tuberculosis. Melvic Lupe, 29 and Leo Paro, 25 had been fit two years ago when they were remanded in Cainta City Jail after striking against Karnation Industries and Export Inc, a home décor company. Their families accuse the prison authorities of criminal neglect, and have been unable to find out whether the men had been medically treated, or to obtain a copy of their medical report. Like many in their situation, the men had been essentially sealed away, though they had not even been convicted.

By tolerating the seclusion of prisons and the secrecy in their operation, society allows them to become gateways to all kinds of other human rights violations, from extreme corruption to torture and extrajudicial execution. Examples only tend to surface in the media sporadically; for the US-led abuses in Guantanamo Bay it took sexually explicit photographs, and in France, which is infamous for its shabby prisons, a significant increase in suicides. Headlines are harder to make in many Asian countries where accountability remains low and the death count in prison is high but badly documented. In Indonesia the issue flared up last year when a corruption task force discovered wealthy VIPs living in air conditioned luxury, with LCD televisions and spa products in central Jakarta, while elsewhere prisons are notoriously overcrowded; audits of prisons are now being taken across the country¹. Efforts by prisoners in Bogambara prison in Kandy, Sri Lanka over Christmas 2009 were less successful: five days of fasting on the prison roof to demand either trials or bail saw no constructive response from the prison authorities, and prompted more hunger striking. A large proportion of Sri Lankan inmates are in remand and can wait for a trial for years, many held under the draconian—and with the war over, arguably redundant—Prevention Against Terrorism Act.

Indeed, thanks to immense delays in justice and widespread corruption, trials—fair or otherwise—can be hard to come by. According to the latest World Pre-trial Imprisonment List (October 2007), two and a quarter million people are known to be held in pre-trial detention (and other forms of remand imprisonment) throughout the world, many of them in debilitating conditions. About another quarter of a million are held in countries such as Sri Lanka, on which data cannot be gathered ². Nowak’s call for action this year therefore extends essentially to the machinery that allows these situations to continue unchallenged. More funding and much greater political will must be brought into play, he notes, for justice systems to start functioning independently, professionally and swiftly.

A convention for detainees would make states more answerable to the expectations of their peers; signatories would be legally bound into a communication channel with experts on the issue, and held regularly and more comprehensively to account. For states that did not sign, the process would still encourage a measure of self-reflection while generating much needed publicity, shining a much-needed, globally-powered light into those places where millions of our most vulnerable are left waiting in the dark.

1  As reported by Indonesian human rights e-journal Caveat in January 2010, the Minister on Justice and Human Rights acknowledged last year that “nationwide our prisons should only hold 80,000 prisoners, while the total number of inmates today is 130,000”.
2  In Bangladesh it has documented that 68 percent of its entire prison population has not yet been tried; in India it puts the pretrial population at 250,000, in the Philippines 60,000, in Pakistan 57,000, in Indonesia 47,000 and in Thailand 33,000. It has been estimated that there are as many as 100,000 untried prisoners in China.