The Horrors Of World Prisons: Report
Inmates at a prison in Uruguay can spend years in “tin cans” — small metal boxes where temperatures rise to 140 degrees F (60 degrees C), while women and children were among prisoners in Nigeria confined to a “torture room.” Those were among the abuses chronicled in a report released on Tuesday by Manfred Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer and U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other forms of cruel and inhuman treatment and punishment. Report from the Washington Post.
Speaking to reporters after submitting his report to the U.N. General Assembly, Nowak said he focused on “forgotten prisons” and the treatment of children in the dozens of countries he visited. Nowak said women and children in Lagos, Nigeria, were among the more than 100 detainees confined to the “torture room” of the Criminal Investigation Department, where torture methods included the firing of gunshots into legs and leaving the severely injured prisoners without medical treatment.
There are some 10 million people behind bars worldwide, most of them in unacceptable circumstances, Nowak said. “My guess is that the clear majority of them have to be in conditions that are violating human dignity,” he said. One widespread problem is overcrowding, which Nowak said he witnessed during visits to countries like Georgia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Togo. In Indonesia and Paraguay, he said, detainees were not only deprived of food and medicine but were sometimes forced to pay a daily fee for their “accommodation” in prison cells. Nowak’s report said he found a woman on death row in a prison in the former Soviet republic of Georgia who had been confined to a bed for years because she was paralyzed.
Some governments responded positively to Nowak’s reports of torture and abusive conditions in their prisons. He said Uruguay was taking steps to shut down the “tin cans,” which he said were an unacceptable form of incarceration. Jordan closed a prison where Nowak found cases of torture, while Nigeria has promised to do the same with the “torture room” in Lagos.
Nowak said torture was commonplace across the Arab world, although he said most Arab countries refused to let him visit their prisons and detention centers. Jordan did allow Nowak access to its jails. Although Nowak did find cases of torture in Jordan, he said it was not systematic.
He said roughly 1 million of the world’s 10 million detainees were children, some as young as 9 or 10 years old. During prolonged periods of pretrial detention, many are not segregated from adult prisoners, leaving them open to abuse. In countries like Indonesia, Togo and Uruguay, Nowak’s report said he found that corporal punishment was being used to discipline child detainees. In Uruguay, he found boys locked up for 22 hours a day with no toilets.
Africa, Americas, INTERNATIONAL, Indonesia, Jordan, Middle East, Nepal, Nigeria, Overcrowding, Sri Lanka, Togo, Uruguay
There are grave deficiencies in the infrastructure of most detention facilities in Israel, and the living conditions in many of them are inhumane, the Public Defender’s Office said in a report published on Sunday.
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