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Sana'a: Yemen's Minister of Human Rights Huda Al Ban has hit out at the government for throwing people into prison on the basis of orders issued by tribal chiefs or others outside the judicial process.
The minister, who made an inspection visit to prisons on the occasion of Ramadan, minced no words about the illegal detentions in a report issued on Thursday which pointed out that there were several detainees in the Central Prison of Sana'a who were being persecuted on orders from tribal leaders or unauthorised bodies.
Al Ban, in her report, demanded an immediate end to all cases of unjustified detentions and sought to highlight that there were even such prisoners who were forced to serve out sentences instead of their convicted relatives who had escaped from justice.
Some influential tribal chiefs are wont to enforce their writ by having people thrown into government prisons or by running their own private jails in the name of upholding tribal custom. The practice of incarcerating relatives instead of escaped convicts, a throwback to the days of the monarchy in the 1960s, is still quite common.
The minister, in her report, also criticised the conditions in some of the prisons and called for "rehabilitation" of prisoners, especially women, children and juveniles.
Women assigned to oversee female prisoners lacked qualifications to relate properly to those in their custody and male juveniles had been put up along with adult men, the report pointed out.
The report called on the government to improve the quality of food served to prisoners, especially pregnant women, and for allocating separate rooms for juvenile offenders.
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