Makarau slams torture of suspects

Judge President Rita Makarau

Judge Makarau condemns suspects torture as inhuman and unacceptable

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The Judge President said there were reports of rampant torture of prisoners in custody of the police before they were taken to court to be charged with crimes they allegedly committed.

Prisoners, she said, were vulnerable to all forms of inhuman treatment during investigations. "These prisoners are most vulnerable to torture, degrading and inhuman treatment during investigations, a method which may not be the best," said Justice Makarau.

She said prisoners should not be subjected to any conduct that took away their alienable rights. The Judge President was speaking at a national training workshop organised by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights.

The two-day workshop that ends today is running under the theme: "Society Promoting the Rights of Prisoners in Zimbabwe." Justice Makarau called on the society to move away from stigma that it attached to prisoners.

"Unless we move away from the stigma, we will continue regarding them as less than human," she said. The Judge President also called on institutions with social bearing to play their role to de-stigmatise prisoners.

The State, she said, should abide by the statutory provisions that cater for the well-being of prisoners during incarceration. Justice Makarau, one of the leading proponents for women rights, also spoke about the need to safeguard the rights of children incarcerated with their mothers.

She said philanthropic organisations in the country should come up with programmes for such children caught in the crossfire but had no one else to look after them.

"Where it cannot be avoided, institutions may be set up to take the children out of prison lifestyle."

Such children can be integrated into nursery and pre-schools for prison staff children. Justice Makarau urged the Law Society of Zimbabwe and the ZLHR to set up a monitoring mechanism to look into cases of prisoners who had been in prison for three years awaiting completion of their trials.

The Judge President, however, commended the strides made by Government in improving the standards of the country’s prisons from independence to 2003.

She said the standards were fairly good before the economic meltdown, which she said severely affected the prisons. The facilities at all the prisons, Justice Makarau said, had crumbled to almost non-existence such that sentencing prisoners to jail had become agonising for judges and magistrates as this was tantamount to condemning them to death chambers.