A Ugandan Lawyer Steven Kalali has petitioned the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) seeking a certificate of urgency to be issued for a case in which he sued the neighboring DRC over violation of prisoner’s rights is fixed for hearing as a matter of urgency.
In his petition filed before the Kampala Sub registry last October, Kalali sued Congo over violations that he says stem from September 1st to 2nd 2024 when there was an attempt by inmates to break out of the overcrowded Central Prison in the Capital City of Kinshasa leading to the deaths of over a hundred people and rape of hundreds of women.
The evidence submitted before Court shows that according to the United Nations (UNFPA) report dated September 9th 2024, out of 348 female inmates population in Makala Central Prison, 269 were raped.
However, more than two months after Kalali filed this case, the matter has never been fixed for hearing.
Kalali had demanded in his application that the misdeeds occasioned on the victims be accounted for or compensated by the DRC government.
Meanwhile, before the attempted prison break incident, aspects of overcrowding had been intimated in a letter dated October 9th 2023 to the Ministry of Justice, the Director of Makala Prison Yusuf Malik Joseph warning of the risk of a mass prison escape similar to one in May 17th 2017.
In the letter, Kalali stated the risk associated with massive and intolerable overcrowding and inadequate conditions of Makala Prison.
He states that at the time of writing the letter, the prison had 12,629 detained and that massive arrivals were still expected from different courts.
“That Makala Prison was built with a capacity of 1,500 inmates and had reached almost 100 percent of inmate capacity with a population estimated around 14,714 at the time of the September 1st to 2nd, 2024 attempted jailbreak”, reads the document.
According to Kalali, at the time of the attempted prison break, the government of DRC was keeping in detention both child and minor detainees together with adult inmates in violation of set international standards, laws or rules.
