LDH lawyer Nadja Gomes warned on Wednesday that the way in which the justice sector operates, and particularly the prisons, has led society to distrust the administration of justice.
Speaking at a Maputo round table on the prison system, Gomes said that the LDH has noted, in its systematic visits to prisons, that human rights are regularly violated. The abuses detected included the torture of prisoners, appalling hygiene conditions, inadequate diet (and sometimes a total lack of food), disrespect for the legal time limits on preventive detention, and the general slowness with which cases are treated.
These problems are linked to the overcrowding in the country's jails, and Gomes warned that they are getting worse.
She noted that prisons habitually contain three times the number of prisoners they were built for.
One example cited by Gomes was the provincial prison in the southern city of Inhambane. It was designed to hold 75 inmates, but earlier this year 290 prisoners were incarcerated there.
As for the Maputo Central Prison, the largest in the country, it should hold no more than 800 inmates. At the time of the last LDH visit, 2,861 people were being held there.
The overcrowding is so bad, said Gomes, that sometimes prisoners sleep in bathrooms, or standing up, or establish a shift system for sleeping.
As a result, a 1995 law on prisons is regularly disregarded.
That law states that "prisoners shall be treated with justice and humanity so that, while they feel the severity of their sentences, they do not suffer from useless humiliations".
One shocking LDH discovery was that some prisoners remain in jail after the end of their sentences. the LDH found 106 prisoners in the Maputo civil jail in this situation.
As for the habitually lethargic pace of the courts, Gomes said that in 2005, the LDH dealt with 709 cases, of which 498 were sent to court. So far only 66 of these have come to trial.
Among the reasons for the snail's pace of judicial proceedings is the poor investigative work done by the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), and the archaic nature of the paperwork. Sometimes case papers can hardly be deciphered because they are written by hand. In parts of the system even typewriters are a rarity, let alone computers.
As for the Supreme Court, Gomes described it as "a graveyard of cases". All appeals go to the Supreme Court, which only has seven judges. A huge backlog has built up, and so any smart lawyer will advise his client to appeal, no matter how open and shut the case is.
The LDH also complains that the police will not let it operate freely. The League's chairperson, Alice Mabota, said that the LDH has recently trained paralegal staff, but these have been unable to work in police stations "because the police will not let them in". (If this is the case, the police are flagrantly violating the policy of the Justice Ministry towards the LDH.)
SOURCE: AIM
