UN investigator: World’s prisons… ‘Tin cans’ of torture and cruelty

A United Nations investigator who has traveled to dozens of countries decried the inhuman treatment of inmates, including children, in prisons as he was witness of it.

Manfred Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer and the UN special rapporteur on torture and other forms of cruel and inhuman treatment and punishment told reporters after submitting his report to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that there are at least one million children, some as young as 9 or 10, among the 10 million humans currently behind bars worldwide.

Most detainees are held in unacceptable conditions in many of the countries' prisons he visited, like the one in Uruguay where inmates spend years in "tin cans" or small metal boxes, where temperatures rise to 60 degrees C (140 degrees F).

He also reported of a prison in Nigeria where women and children are confined to a "torture room" and of prisoners who live in conditions that violate "human dignity".

Some prisons, he said, were overcrowded. The detainees were not only deprived of food and medicine, but were sometimes forced to pay a daily fee for their accommodation in prison cells, he added.

Torture was common in the Arab world, Nowak said. Many Arab countries refused him entry to their prisons.

Children in many countries were not segregated from adult prisoners during prolonged periods of pretrial detention, leaving them open to abuse. He also said that he found corporal punishment was being used to discipline child detainees in some countries and found boys locked up for 22 hours a day with no toilets.

He also criticized the US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba for harsh treatment of terrorism suspects, adding that he doubted US President Barack Obama would be able to shut it down as planned by January 2010.

However, some countries have responded positively to Nowak's criticism.

Uruguay is shutting down its "tin can" prisons, and Jordan - one of the few Arab countries that allowed him access to its prisons - has closed a prison where Nowak had noted cases of torture.