TUNIS: Tunisia's interim government should ease overcrowding and reverse a policy imposed more than 15 years ago to deny inmates facing the death penalty any contact with their families, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch made the requests to the new justice minister, Lazhar Karoui Chebbi, after visiting two Tunisian prisons. The visits ended a 20-year ban on access to Tunisian prisons by human rights organizations. On February 2, 2011, the two-member Human Rights Watch delegation visited Bourj er-Roumi, a large prison complex near the city of Bizerte where there was an inmate mutiny as the previous government fell. The delegation visited Mornaguia Prison, Tunisia's biggest facility, on February 1. The researchers interviewed prisoners in private, including two facing the death penalty who had been deprived of all contact with their family, one for three years and the other for 10. The events that occurred at Bourj er-Roumi will be the subject of a separate communiqué. “By granting us access, Tunisia's transitional government has taken a step toward transparency in its prison operations that we hope will continue and extend to local organizations,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The transitional government also needs to break with the inhumane treatment of prisoners practiced by the ousted government.” As an immediate step, Human Rights Watch said, the transitional government should allow Tunisia's 140 death-row prisoners to receive family visits like other prisoners. The transitional government should also allow prisoners confined to severely overcrowded cells more time outside them each day, Human Rights Watch said. A Justice Ministry official told Human Rights Watch that prior to President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's ouster, Tunisia, a country of 10.5 million inhabitants, had 31,000 prisoners. It was the highest per capita prison population of any country in the Middle East and North Africa except Israel, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies. One of the first promises made on behalf of the transitional government by Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi was an imminent amnesty for all political prisoners. However, a draft law approved by the cabinet has yet to become law. In the meantime, the judiciary has granted conditional release or pre-trial provisional release to about half of Tunisia's more than 500 political prisoners. Access to Tunisia's Prisons The Tunisian Human Rights League was the last independent human rights organization to visit a Tunisian prison, in 1991. But the government ended the group's visits shortly after it began. Ben Ali's government promised on April 19, 2005, to give Human Rights Watch prompt access to prisons. Five-and-a-half years later, negotiations on the terms of the visits had gone nowhere. The government set what Human Rights Watch considered unreasonable conditions for the visits and failed to respond to counter-proposals. Tunisia has allowed regular visits since 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a humanitarian organization that – in contrast to organizations like Human Rights Watch – does not make its findings public but instead presents reports to the ministries in charge. The ICRC visits Tunisia's prisons, which are administered by the Justice Ministry, as well as the official pre-arraignment detention centers (garde à vue) administered by the Interior Ministry. Prison Visits for Death Row Inmates A Justice Ministry official told Human Rights Watch that Tunisia has about 140 prisoners facing the death penalty, half of them in Mornaguia Prison, 14 kilometers west of Tunis. The previous government retained the death penalty in law, but has practiced a de facto moratorium on executions since 1994, meaning some inmates have been on death row for more than 15 years. The prison administration decided in the mid-1990s to deny death row inmates any contact with family members. All other prisoners have been allowed brief weekly visits from family members and may also correspond with them. This policy also deprives death row prisoners of the home-cooked meals and fruit that families are allowed to deliver to other prisoners regularly. Prison staff privately expressed frustration about this policy to Human Rights Watch, saying it complicates their job of managing a uniquely challenging group of inmates. This policy apparently has no basis in any publicly issued directive, Human Rights Watch said. It violates Tunisia's Law 2001-52, of May 14, 2001, Governing Prisons, which gives all prisoners without distinction the right to visits by their relatives “according to the laws in effect” and to exchange correspondence with them “via the administration” (article 18 (2) and (3)). Tunisia's government should move to abolish the death penalty as a punishment that is inherently cruel and inhuman. Such a measure, if passed, should also immediately result in the commutation of the sentences of those condemned to die. “Tunisia should abolish the death penalty first and foremost, but in any event, it should immediately give prisoners on death row the same rights to family visits and correspondence as other prisoners” Goldstein said. HRW
