The United State 2022 Country Reports on Human Rights has stated that Nigerian Prison and detention center conditions remained harsh and life threatening.
2022 Country Reports on Human Rights was launched by the United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken on Monday,
While launching, Secretary Blinken said the reports embodies the importance of human rights for American diplomacy and for its vision of an open, free, prosperous, and secure world.
Adding that the reports makes a factual, objective, and rigorous accounting of human rights conditions around the world, looking at nearly 200 countries and territories.
In Nigeria, the report stated that prisoners and detainees were reportedly subjected to gross overcrowding, inadequate medical care, food and water shortages, and other abuses.
Some of these conditions resulted in deaths, adding that the government sometimes detained suspected militants outside the formal prison system.
It further stated that overcrowding was a significant problem. As of September, prison facilities had 50 percent more inmates than designed capacity.
According to the government, pretrial detainees were held with convicted prisoners, and approximately 70 percent of inmates were in pretrial detention.
Authorities sometimes held female and male prisoners together, especially in rural areas. Prison authorities sometimes held juvenile suspects with adults.
The reports said many prisons were constructed 70 to 80 years ago and lacked basic facilities. Some prisons had no facilities to care for pregnant women or nursing inmates.
Although the law prohibits the imprisonment of children, children lived in the prisons, and some were born there.
The reports noted that several military detention facilities continued to operate, including the Giwa Barracks facility in Maiduguri, Borno State.
According to press and NGO reports, the military continued to arrest and remand to military detention facilities, including Giwa Barracks, persons suspected of association with Boko Haram or ISIS-WA.
Human Rights Watch reported in late September the government handover protocol with the United Nations to transfer children taken into military custody on suspicion of involvement with terrorist groups to civilian authorities for reintegration.
It emphasized lack of potable water, inadequate sewage facilities, and overcrowding sometimes resulted in dangerous and unsanitary conditions.
Adding that disease remained pervasive in cramped, poorly ventilated prison facilities, which had chronic shortages of medical supplies.
Inadequate medical treatment caused some prisoners to die from treatable illnesses, such as HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. This situation was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although authorities attempted to isolate persons with communicable diseases, facilities often lacked adequate space, and inmates with these illnesses lived with the general prison population.
Prisons provided limited health care to inmates and transferred seriously ill prisoners to government hospitals.
Generally, prison officials made few efforts to provide mental health services or other accommodations to prisoners with mental disabilities, according to the reports.
The reports pointed out that guards and prison employees reportedly extorted inmates or levied fees on them to pay for food, prison maintenance, transport to routine court appointments, and release from prison.
Only prisoners with money or support from their families had sufficient food. Prison employees sometimes stole money provided for prisoners’ food. Poor inmates sometimes relied on handouts from others to survive.
Prison employees, police, and other security force personnel sometimes denied inmates food and medical treatment to punish them or extort money, the report stated.
The reports stressed that no legal requirement to autopsy individuals who die in custody and no reliable statistics on total number of prison deaths during the year, either due to physical conditions of prisons, jails, and other detention facilities, or to prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
It confirmed that authorities generally investigated credible allegations of mistreatment, but such allegations were rarely made.
Proven allegations of misconduct generally led to administrative sanctions, sometimes including dismissal from government service, but rarely criminal charges, the reports added.
