Prisoners face castration
Men convicted of raping children under the age of 10 will face surgical castration, under a law passed last month in the African nation of Madagascar. The punishment would be in addition to a jail term of up to life imprisonment, meaning that the procedure – involving removal of the testicles – would be carried out on prisoners.
The law has been approved by the country’s senate, but must still be approved and signed into law by President Andry Rajoelina – who first suggested it – before it can take effect. Madagascar’s justice minister Landy Randriamanantenasoa said it was a necessary move due to an increase in offences of rape against children. There were 600 cases in the country last year.
The new law is supported by victims’ group Women Break the Silence. However, human rights group Amnesty International is opposing it, calling it “inhuman and degrading”. It claims Madagascan courts are corrupt, meaning they might not reach correct verdicts in trials, and points out that it would be problematic if a man was castrated but later cleared on appeal.
Details of the new law say that a sentence of surgical castration “will always be pronounced” for those found guilty of raping a child under 10. Men who rape children between the ages of 10 and 13 may be surgically or chemically castrated, whilst those who rape children aged 14 to 17 will be chemically castrated.
Few countries in the world permit surgical castration as a punishment, although in Czechia it is available as a voluntary option for men convicted of sexual offences. Chemical castration is used in some parts of the United States, and in South Korea.
Putin’s opponent dies in Arctic penal colony
Russia’s best-known prisoner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny died suddenly last month at a penal colony in the Arctic Circle, widely assumed to have been poisoned on the orders of President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny, 47, was serving a 19-year sentence for political-motivated charges of ‘extremism’. He was moved last year to a jail known as Arctic Wolf in Russia’s far north. In messages released through his lawyers and posted on social media, he revealed that he was suing the prison authorities for refusing to provide him with winter boots, and joked that it was possible to go for a walk outdoors in the -32C weather “only if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers”.
He died on February 16, having appeared healthy in a court appearance the previous day. Navalny had already been poisoned once before, with the nerve agent Novichok, in 2020. At the time he was taken for hospital treatment in Germany, but bravely chose to return to Russia in 2021 to continue his campaigning, despite warnings that he was likely to be killed.
A million political prisoners
The United States – a country which imprisons two million of its own people – has launched a campaign accusing other nations of detaining people unfairly.
The ‘Without Just Cause’ campaign, begun by the US State Department last year, alleges that an estimated one million people around the globe are held as political prisoners. It says they are held unjustly for exercising human rights and fundamental freedoms, or detained because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or who they love.
It is suggested that Russia has about 500 political prisoners, but that is eclipsed by Iran with a possible 20,000 people jailed after peaceful protests which followed the death in 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman allegedly beaten by the country’s morality police for failing to wear a headscarf in accordance with Islamic law. Other countries singled out by the US campaign include China and Nicaragua.
Prisoners ‘killed and turned into burgers’
A former prison director in Colombia has confessed to having covered up crimes committed by prisoners including extortion, murder – and even cannibalism.
William Gacharná Castro claimed that when he was director of La Modelo prison in the country’s capital, Bogotá, he was just a spectator and the jail was really run by paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and guerrilla groups. He said that the bodies of killed prisoners were buried in tunnels or dissolved in acid. He also alleged that paramilitaries ran a small ‘business’ in which meat products such as hamburgers and sausages, made from human flesh, were sold to other prisoners.
Castro ran the prison between 1999 and 2003, at the height of an armed conflict between Colombian government forces and FARC guerillas. His admissions were made to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), a body created under a 2016 peace deal between the two sides to investigate atrocities of the past.
La Modelo holds 11,000 people and has long had a reputation for violence. In 2000, after the dismembered corpse of a paramilitary leader was found, a 12-hour battle between paramilitaries in the prison and police left 32 dead and 17 ‘missing’. In 2016, remains of at least 100 prisoners and visitors were found in drainpipes at the jail. Despite all the horror stories, there is no evidence to support the former director’s claims of prisoners eating each other.
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