Expatica.com

Con­di­tions in two of Haiti’s main jails are “cruel, inhu­man and degrad­ing”, with severe over­crowd­ing after pris­ons were dam­aged in an earth­quake in Jan­u­ary, a UN human rights expert warned Wednesday.

The inde­pen­dent expert on the sit­u­a­tion of human rights in Haiti, Michel Forst, vis­ited the National Pen­i­ten­tiary and the prison of Cayes April 21 to May 1.

“Both places are over­crowded with detainees liv­ing in cruel, inhu­man, and degrad­ing con­di­tions, in the mean­ing of the (UN) con­ven­tion against tor­ture,” he said in a report to the UN Human Rights Council.

Part of the National Pen­i­ten­tiary is in dan­ger of col­laps­ing and detainees are kept in one build­ing “where con­di­tions are even more severe than before the earth­quake”, the report added.

Forst cited Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee of the Red Cross (ICRC) esti­mates that each pris­oner had on aver­age 0.3 square metres (3.2 square feet) of floor space.

Forst also called for a “seri­ous and impar­tial” inves­ti­ga­tion after about 10 pris­on­ers at Cayes were shot dead when they tried to escape a week after the Jan­u­ary 12 earthquake.

Rel­a­tives and other pris­on­ers said they were shot by police and their bod­ies were buried in a mass grave.

Forst said some of about 5,000 pris­on­ers who escaped when the quake shat­tered their jails returned of their own voli­tion, although he gave no number.

How­ever, gang chiefs were still out, adding to inse­cu­rity and the decline in an already “pre­car­i­ous” human rights sit­u­a­tion, he added.

Some infor­ma­tion indi­cated that com­plaints to police for vio­lent crime in Haiti had grown by 150 per­cent, the report said, with gangs act­ing with impunity.

The earth­quake lev­eled much of the cap­i­tal Port-au-Prince, killing more than 250,000 people.

http://www.expatica.com/ch/news/swiss-news/haiti-s-jails-are-cruel-inhuman-and-degrading–un-expert_77078.html