On 26 June 2020, the UN Anti-Torture Mechanisms issued a statement on how COVID-19 exacerbates the risk of ill-treatment and torture worldwide. The statement notes that excessive force to enforce curfews and social distancing rules can amount to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment. The experts stressed that independent...

The Global Fund Sex workers in Africa are among the communities suffering the most due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdowns and police crackdowns leave millions without income. Sex workers have always been vulnerable to violence and infectious diseases such as HIV, but COVID-19 has increased those risks. “With the...

The Daily Nation By Grace Ngenye When I read the Daily Nation article (June 17, 2020) on the Committee on Criminal Justice Reforms (NCCJR), my first reaction was gratitude for the attention the work we are doing to transform this critical sector is finally getting. Many facts were missed and...

Times Live A law that criminalises children who possess or use cannabis has been declared unconstitutional by a Johannesburg high court judge. Judge Ingrid Opperman said the way children were still being treated, two years after the Constitutional Court decriminalised cannabis possession and use for adults, was redolent of apartheid...

On 14 July 2020, the Malawi Prison Service registered its first COVID-19 case at Mzimba Prison through a prisoner. On the same day, an inmate also tested positive for the virus at Chichiri Prison in Blantyre. Each of the two cases have been isolated, as have been  prisoners and warders...

The African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum (APCOF) welcomes the opportunity to make this submission to the Special Rapporteur on Prisons, Conditions of Detention and Policing in Africa, and we do so on behalf of the Regional Campaign to Decriminalise Petty Offences in Africa (‘the Regional Campaign’). More information about the...

A Nigerian court has voided the arrest of commercial sex workers in Abuja by law enforcement officials. The Abuja Federal High Court presided over by Justice Binta Nyako on Wednesday declared that officials of a security task force acted outside the law when they broke into apartments in Abuja suburbs around 11...

By: WIEGO Date: February 2020 Through photography and text, this e-book offers an in-depth look at the important role street vendors play in cities, the challenges they face, and the solutions that can make cities more vibrant, secure, and affordable for all.  It also provides insights into how street vendor organizations...

Although there is no law against prostitution in Malawi, sex workers routinely face abuse and wrongful arrest by police who give in to social stigma and misunderstand the law, according to campaigners. That leaves them vulnerable to violence, because they can’t rely on police to help them when they are...

21 Civil society organizations have formed the Uganda Coalition to decriminalize petty offences. The coalition was formed at a 2-day retreat convened by the Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum (HRAPF) a member of the regional network on decriminalization of petty offences. Private individuals including the Uganda Human Rights Commission...

H.E the President of the Republic of Uganda has directed that no person should be arrested for the crime of "idle and disorderly". The President has also directed that all those already arrested for this crime, be released immediately and prosecution discontinued. I hereby instruct all police officers to fully comply...

Today the petition challenging the constitutionality of Section 168 (1) (c) and (d), of Uganda's Penal Code Act, which creates the offence of 'being rogue and vagabond,' Francis Tumwesige Vs Attorney General, Constitutional Petition No.36 of 2018, came up for conferencing between the petitioner and the respondent's counsel. However, the Attorney...

By ERIC WAINAINA Weeks ago as Mr Kamau Mburu and other people were walking home shortly past 11 pm, they were rounded up in Kirigiti and taken to Kiambu Police Station. At the station, the farmhand and fellow “suspects” found more people, mostly young people who had been picked up...

By Sarah Nyakio Seven out of 10 inmates in the country are petty offenders with the lowest case determination rates, the Annual Criminal Justice Conference was told on Tuesday, May 21, 2019. According to the audit on Criminal Justice System in Kenya report, 28,768 charges prosecuted in 15 Kenyan courts...

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) will continue to highlight and push reforms to address alternative measures that may mitigate the excessive use of pre-trial detention. Executive Secretary of NHRC, Mr Tony Ojukwu, made this known on Thursday, during a visit to the Kuje Prison in commemoration of The African...

Enter a prison and brace yourself for the harsh experience of inmates imprisoned in colonial times. Not much has changed since the 1900s in terms of facilities and, many say, in treatment. Still, some inmates have left prison reformed and better skilled to earn a living on the outside. One...

Mombasa senator Mohammed Faki has decried the increasing number of petty offenders congesting Kenyan prisons. Speaking in Mombasa Friday during the reopening of the Mombasa Court of Appeal, Senator Faki appealed to the judicial system to device ways of giving minor offenders alternative sentences instead of serving prison terms. This...

Mr Nelson Basubinin Duut, Director of Prisons Technical and Services, on Thursday suggested that Prison overcrowding could be addressed by decriminalizing petty offences in Ghana. He said studies on the current overcrowding situations of Ghanaian prisons from 2015 to 2019 revealed that our prison facility had an average overcrowding rate...

    Recently, key criminal justice players in Kenya, led by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution (ODPP), pitched a tent in Lamu County for a service week. The intention of the state and non-state actors in this part of the All for Justice Project, which seeks to...

Mr Edmund Amarkwei Foley, a human rights activist, has urged the Government to set national targets to reduce the number of people in jail. He noted that the Nsawam Prison, for instance, was built to house about 800 inmates, but currently had more than 2,000. There was, therefore, the need...

An advocacy group, Prisoners’ Rehabilitation and Welfare Action, has called on the governments of Lagos, Abia, Enugu and Kano states as well as the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, to review their practice of jailing petty offenders, including street hawkers. PRAWA said following a survey it conducted in the four states...

In May 2015, the Legal Resources Foundation Trust and the National Council on the Administration of Justice commissioned an audit into the criminal justice system in Kenya, with a specific bias to pre-trial detention and case flow management. The survey looked at conditions of detention, the age of detainees, reasons...

Judiciary report is raising serious concerns over the number of cases being overturned on appeal, and the low number of suspects charged after arrests. The report, Status of the Judiciary and Administration of Justice, raises concerns about the quality of prosecutions as almost half of convictions by magistrates’ courts, which...

The High Court has ordered six police officers to pay Sh4 million to a lawyer they had arrested and detained illegally. The officers will also pay Sh3.8 million to 19 other people they had arrested and locked in a cell at the Ongata Rongai police station. Each of the 19...

South Africa’s move towards decriminalisation aligns with the developmental approach to crime and violence. Speaking at the launch of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules) on 25 July 2018, Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Michael Masutha said drastic steps need to be taken to...

A number of convicts have walked to freedom after successfully appealing against being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. The wheels of criminal justice in Kenya rotate very slowly, and it is not unusual to find such persons being acquitted after serving considerable time in the dungeons. Take the...

Since Aug. 21, prisoners across the United States have been on one of the largest prison strikes the nation has seen in years. They have several demands, but at the top is the end of the forced labor the state coerces out of them. Up to 800,000 prisoners a day...

The concrete floor of a prison cell crawls with bodies as detainees labour to draw their limbs closer to their torsos. The little light illuminating this daily custom, an exercise in preventing unwanted contact, enters through two small windows with bars on them. This scene, captured on film at a...

The criminal justice system in many African countries is characterized by widespread criminalization and punishment of petty offenses through arbitrary arrests which provides a basis for the violation of human rights of poor, marginalized and vulnerable people. Particularly for poor and marginalized groups, the justice system can be difficult to understand and...

In March 2015, the applicant was arrested by police whilst on his way to the market where he works as a street vendor. He was charged with the offence of being a rogue and vagabond. Section 184(1)(c) of the Penal Code provides that “every person in or upon or near any premises or...

Almost three-quarters of criminal cases in Nairobi and Narok counties are traffic violations, shows report The high number of traffic cases is disrupting the criminal justice system yet there is little evidence to show that sentences are making roads safe. Traffic offences constitute more than a third — 36 per...

The government has formed a task force to oversee the implementation of rules to enforce instant fines for traffic offences following a court order that gave approval. Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi says the multi-agency taskforce chaired by Transport Principal Secretary Esther Koimett has been given 30 days before the...

Many hawkers in Kenya, from anecdotal evidence, have been women. They educate, feed, shelter and clothe their children with the income from what they knew best and how they knew best: Selling wares in the streets and markets. It is their sense of dignity. But they are now being stripped...

India’s top court struck down a colonial-era law that made homosexual acts punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a landmark victory for gay rights in the world’s largest democracy. In a unanimous decision, five Supreme Court justices ruled that the law was a weapon used to harass members...

Many hawkers in Kenya, from anecdotal evidence, have been women. They educate, feed, shelter and clothe their children with the income from what they knew best and how they knew best: Selling wares in the streets and markets. It is their sense of dignity. But they are now being stripped...

New Delhi, September 9-- The unanimous Indian Supreme Court judgment which ended the ban on consensual gay sex in private is a landmark verdict which is a “call to action” for all countries in the Commonwealth which still use regressive, outdated colonial law, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) said today. In...

By Dorothy Otieno  Almost three-quarters of criminal cases in Nairobi and Narok counties are traffic violations, shows report The high number of traffic cases is disrupting the criminal justice system yet there is little evidence to show that sentences are making roads safe. Traffic offences constitute more than a third...

Almost half of the 140 inmates in Warren County Jail have been prescribed psychotropic drugs, and more than half are receiving mental health treatment. It would be as accurate to call the facility a mental health center as a jail, judging by its population. The problem is, the staffers are...