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In any given situation a number of factors influence the ability of human rights groups to collect precise information. Some of these are noted on pages 29 to 34. Perhaps the two key factors are whether there exists a popular awareness of and appreciation for human rights and an expectation that basic rights should not be violated and whether an individual citizen can be confident that to report a violation will not itself lead to further reprisals. Guinea and Ethiopia are prime examples of those countries where collection of reliable information encounters considerable obstacles because the factors identified above are absent.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, you asked for comment on recent steps toward the establishment of an international structure for human rights protection in the African region. On page 34 you will find mention of some of the significant initiatives which have been taken to promote the establishment of an effective mechanism within Africa. The United Nations sponsored seminar in Monrovia was the most recent in a series of initiatives which have created some momentum within Africa. Of particular importance was the commission of inquiry, undertaken by five African countries, into the killing of children in the Central African Empire.

This inquiry created an important precedent which we hope will be repeated on later occasions where African governments are charged with gross violations of human rights.

We believe that the present momentum within Africa must also be set within a wider context. The standard set in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not seen as alien by African countries. All have subscribed to the Declaration, all voted for the 1975 U.N. declaration against torture, a growing number of states have acceded to the international covenant for civil and political rights which, I must say respectfully, the United States has not and some states have ratified the optional protocol which enables victims who are denied their rights at home to seek a remedy internationally.

Whether or not an effective African regional machinery is established soon, the United Nations provides a framework for protection which many African states have now accepted. We believe that this is an important structure to support and encourage, and we hope that your subcommittee will do this both in your dealings with African states and also by encouraging your colleagues in the Senate to ratify the international covenants on behalf of the United States.

Thank you very much.

[Mr. McGee's prepared statement follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF VINCENT MCGEE AND STEPHANIE GRANT,
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL U.S.A.

AFRICA HUMAN RIGHTS PROBLEMS

Amnesty International is a worldwide human rights movement which works impartially for the release of prisoners of conscience, provided they have neither used nor advocated violence. Amnesty International is a participatory, membership organization independent of governments and political groups. It has consultative status with the United Nations, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe, has cooperative relations with the Organizations of African Unity, and was the recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Peace.

AI's work springs from a very specific and limited mandate: that of assisting prisoners, whether by working for the unconditional release of prisoners of

conscience, by combating torture and the death penalty, or by working for fair trials and improved prison conditions. This mandate excludes, but in no sense down grades, the social and economic rights. The two sets of rights-civil and political, and social and economic-tend to compliment each other: when those deprived of their socio-economic rights cannot make their voices heard, they are unlikely to have their needs met.

This testimony will address four specific questions. We have been asked by you to identify those human rights problems in Africa which are of specific concern to AI, and also to comment on some of the countries where the most serious violations are taking place. We will also comment on recent steps which have been taken towards the establishment of international and regional structures to protect human rights. In addition to these important issues, you asked us to say something about the problem of collecting reliable information on human rights violations, and how Amnesty International conducts its research. We would preface these remarks by expressing our appreciation of your decision to hold this hearing. It is abundantly clear that not only the redress, but also the reporting of human rights abuses present special problems. This is the first time that Congress has addressed these important questions in Africa, and we applaud the initiative taken by your two subcommittees.

Major human rights problems

In Africa, our dominant concerns focus on several specific areas: untried detention, torture, the use of the death penalty both judicially and extra judicially, and prison conditions. We will also offer a brief comment on legal procedures in some political cases.

Untried detention, whether by statute law (as in Southern Africa and many former British colonies), by emergency decree (as in some French speaking states), or by political decision (as in Ethiopia), is used in a significant number of African countries. Its purpose and duration will vary, but a common feature of all these situations is the governments' decision to circumvent the courts, and detain real or perceived opponents without legal formality or due process. In short-term, the purpose may be to intimidate or to interrogate, but where prisoners are held for years without trial, the intent will rather be to suppress opposition and remove opponents from the political arena. In Rhodesia, the detention of nationalist leaders-some for as long as 10 years-was traditionally a technique whereby the white government sought to control the black nationalist movement. However not all detainees have been active politically; in Kenya, the well-known writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, was detained alongside elected members of parliament; in Zaire and Mozambique numbers of Jehovah's Witnesses are held, presumably to suppress their religious activities.

Long-term detention is often accompanied by bad prison conditions; this complaint was made strongly, if retrospectively, by the Kenyan parliamentarians, released last year, who criticized inadequate medical treatment, denial of all reading material except the Bible and very limited family visits. Harsh conditions are currently reported from both Cameroon and Ethiopia. Short-term detention correlates closely with interrogation and torture, particularly where the detainee is held incommunicado and denied legal access. The clearest example of legislation which all but encourages this abuse is Section 6 of the South African Terrorism Act, which empowers detention incommunicado by the police until-in the opinion of the police-a prisoner has replied "satisfactorily" to questions.

Recent reports of short-term detention have come, interalia, from Togo (include some children under the age of 15), and from Zaire where students were arrested after the February strike at Kinshasa University. In Sudan 400 people have recently been arrested after strikes, demonstrations and protests against government economic policies, and against its support for the Camp David agreement.

Perhaps the gravest situation of long-term detention is found in Ethiopia, where about 200 officials of the Haile Selassie government, and some of their wives and children have been held in the harshest conditions since 1974. Supporters of political and secessionist groups have been arrested more recently, and the number of long-term untried prisoners totals several thousands (see page 17).

The legal basis for detention varies from country to country. In Somalia, the Preventive Detention Act enables the President to sign detention orders, which are subject to no independent review procedure; the case of Yusuf Osman Samantar, formerly Secretary General of the Democratic Union and now completing

his third year of detention, is appended to this testimony. Cameroonian prisoners are held under a presidential decree which allows indefinitely renewable states of emergency, and detention for "the suppression of subversion". In April this year the Liberian national legislature passed an Emergency Powers Act which gives the executive sweeping powers for the suppression of “plots, conspiracies, sedition, and treason"; habeas corpus is suspended.

The line between short and long-term detention is often blurred. In many countries short-term detention orders may be renewed indefinitely by executive decision; for example, students arrested in Cameroon in 1976 are still detained although their orders are supposedly limited to two months. A similar situation exists in Swaziland, and also in South Africa in the Ciskei and Venda homelands under proclamations which allow renewable 90 day periods of detention incommunicado.

International law prohibits untried detention as a general rule, and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has now been ratified by a number of African states. Untried detention clearly violates article 9, which states:

"Anyone who is deprived from his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful".

The same legal principle was endorsed by the African Bar Association in Freetown last year. It declared:

"That access to the courts . . . and due process of law are a fundamental right of the individual . . . that any law which purports . . . to oust the jurisdiction of the courts on any matter is a derogation from the concept of fundamental rights and is to that extent obnoxious".

In practice, however, it is rare that detainees are able to challenge their imprisonment either before the courts or even before some kind of administrative tribunal of the type which reviews detentions under the emergency powers (though not under martial law) in Rhodesia. In both Zambia and Ghana, the courts have granted habeas corpus to detainees (though not all were in fact released), but these exceptions to the general rule that detention orders are immune from scrutiny by the courts.

During their struggle for freedom, the nationalist movements of various African states were exposed to the use of torture on their militants and in suspected sympathizers. Not withstanding the guarantees against torture or illtreatment which were then incorporated into the constitutions of most African states, reports of the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners are common. Nor are they confined to any single country or region. The context, however, may vary. Torture has occurred in connection with the large-scale ethnic conflicts in Nigeria, in Sudan and in Burundi. It may be an adjunt to political trials, as a means of extracting confession and incriminating the accused. It may be not only a means of interrogation but also to punish and intimidate.

Torture is most often associated with short-term detention, where prisoners are denied access to lawyers or relatives. Section 6 of the South African Terrorism Act clearly provides an opportunity for the ill-treatment of detainees, as was shown at the Biko inquest, and also in allegations by other released detainees. A similar situation exists in Namibia. In Uganda, the torture and murder of prisoners was commonplace under Amin, especially by the public safety unit and the State Research Bureau. In Ethiopia it was widely used during the period of the "Red terror" in 1977-8 and reports continue. In Guinea it was used as a means of obtaining confessions from suspected opponents of the government. Serious allegations are presently being received from Zaire.

Despite the lead taken by the United Nations in this matter,' few African countries have instituted criminal investigation into reports of torture and prosecuted those responsible. Tanzania presented officials charged with using torture in 1977, but this case is almost unique. In Zambia, the appeal court has on several occasions granted damages to alleged tortured victims, but without them bringing criminal proceedings against those responsible. In Rhodesia, attempts by victims to use the courts to obtain redress were rendered ineffective in October 1975 by the introduction of the Indemnity and Compensation Act. which effectively provides retroactive immunity to responsible officials.

While the suffering to a victim is the most obvious characteristic of torture. it can have grave legal consequences in those countries where forced confessions

1 "The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Torture and Other Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment" (G.A. Resolution 3452 (xxx) of 1975) identifies the steps to be taken by governments when allegations are made.

are accepted as evidence in court. In Rhodesia torture has been used to press detainees to confess to recruiting nationalist guerrillas: this offense carries a mandatory death penalty.

Most African legal systems provide for the use of the death penalty, although the frequency with which it is inflicted varies considerably from country to country. It is commonly imposed for violent criminal offenses such as murder or rape, but may also be applied for a whole range of other offenses which might be regarded as relatively minor in other situations; this will relate to the social and political circumstances prevailing in a particular country. In Ethiopia and Uganda, for example two countries that had experienced severe economic difficulties-the death penalty was introduced for certain "economic crimes" such as hoarding grain or consumer goods, embezzlement, fraud and illegal currency dealing.

Faced with a rapid increase in the incidence of armed robbery, Zambia and Kenya introduced a mandatory death sentence for this offense in 1974 and 1975 respectively. In Rhodesia, the Smith regime attempted to use the death penalty to intimidate the African civilian population into betraying the whereabouts and activities of nationalist guerrillas; amendments to the Law Order (Maintenance) Act have made it a capital offense to provide them with food and shelter or to fail to report their presence to security forces. One of the most disturbing features of this area is the frequency with which people charged with political offenses are tried and executed after the most summary of judicial hearings. In a number of African countries, particularly those under military regimes, summary executions have followed periods of national crisis. In Nigeria, 37 people were executed in March and May 1976 after the assassination of the head of state; in Sudan 98 people were executed in August 1976 after an abortive coup. The recent execution of three former heads of state in Ghana took place after they had been convicted by a speciallycreated military corruption court, which denied them proper rights of defense or appeal and sentenced them to death.

Mozambique, which adopted an abolitionist position immediately after independence, introduced the death penalty in February 1979, since then at least 23 people have been executed.

Another area of AI concern is the incidence of extra-judicial killings by official or pro-governmental forces. The mass murder of students and children in the Central African Empire is fortunately now a matter of history. But killings on this scale were not unprecedented. In Burundi, earlier this decade, perhaps 100,000 killings took place, directed against the Hutu tribe. Similarly, more recently, in Uganda there was systematic murder of Acholi and Langi groups. Similar large-scale killing took place in Equatorial Guinea under former president Macias. In Ethiopia the total number of people killed in the name of the "Red terror" was probably 5,000 in the first three months of 1978 alone; bodies were displayed in the streets of Addis Ababa with placards labelling them "counter-revolutionaries".

In some individual cases, the government's failure to investigate deaths of prominent members of the opposition suggests a degree of complicity. One clear example is the killing of Archbishop Luwum in Uganda in 1977; another is the murder of the Kenyan M.P., J.M. Kariuki in 1975. Equally, the South African government's failure to prosecute security police involved in the deaths of Steve Biko and other political detainees held under the Terrorism Act suggests acquiescence.

In many countries of Africa prison conditions for political prisoners fall far below the basic standards set in the UN Standard Minimum Rules. To an extent this may be due to economic and social conditions in the countries concerned, but in some cases conditions appear to have been made deliberately harsh. Many prisoners arrested in 1971 were deliberately starved to death at Camp Boiro in Guinea; before 1977, no visits or communication with the outside world were permitted for the many long-term detainees at Mikuyu in Malawi; or, until Bokassa's fall, at Ngaragba in the Central African Empire; similar constraints exist now at Ekafera in Zaire. Routine beatings of prisoners are reported from Tchollire in Cameroon.

Complaints are also received from southern Africa. Sentenced political prisoners on Robben Island in South Africa received no remission of sentence, unlike convicted criminal prisoners, and are also deliberately denied access to news. All but basic study facilities have now been withdrawn. In Rhodesia, the regime at Khami prison near Bulawayo is also extremely severe, and although

the International Committee of the Red Cross has been allowed to visit detainees held under emergency powers at Wha Wha, they are unable to visit sentenced prisoners in Bulawayo.

In too many countries, prisons are severely overcrowded, have low standards of hygiene, sanitation, and medical facilities: other common complaints concern poor or inadequate diet, and the failure of governments to open their prisons to inspection by the ICRC.

However, this is not a universal picture. In some countries-Lesotho, Tanzania and Swaziland-proper prison regulations exist and are generally observed, and established prison services operate relatively well. In practice, these tend to be countries without a long tradition of political imprisonment.

Political trials. A number of African countries use legislation which violates United Nations international human rights norms, and so provides a legal basis for prosecution and imprisonment of dissidents. The Terrorism and Internal Security Acts in South Africa, and the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act in Rhodesia are clear examples of laws which severely circumscribe freedom of political activity, opinion and expression. In Mali, freedom of expression is placed in some jeopardy by a law which provides that anyone who "by speech, loud voice, or menacing tone . . . or by written documents" insults the head of state is liable to up to 5 years imprisonment. This has been used to silence critics of the government. In Togo, six religious faiths are permitted by law, and others-including Jehovah's Witnesses-are proscribed.

Major problems of due process also exist. Recently these have included the absence of defense representation (e.g. before the martial law courts in Rhodesia); proceedings in camera (e.g. South Africa); the use of special courts which lack judicial independence in the face of political pressure (e.g. the revolutionary tribunal in the Congo in 1978, the Kebelle tribunals in Ethiopia during the "Red terror," military courts in Cameroon and martial law courts in Rhodesia). A related problem is the existence in a number of countries of relatively independent security agencies, who are distinct from the official agencies of law enforcement, and are able to operate outside the framework of normal legislation. Some of these have become a law unto themselves, for example the Young Pioneers in Malawi which operated outside even police control, and certain party youth wings in Zaire. Many security forces operate with virtually unfettered discretion to arrest and imprison. While the political context is very different, a remark made by Colonel Goosen at the Biko inquest has relevance in some independent African countries; when asked under what authority he worked, he replied simply: the South African security police "do not work under statute."

We will now summarize the human rights situation in five specific countries. Zaire

In the face of both armed rebellion and internal opposition the Zairean government has resorted to various measures which have resulted in the violation of human rights. The constitution, which was most recently revised in February 1978, guarantees certain basic rights, but in practice the articles which assure freedom of religion and expression and prohibit the use of torture, summary execution, arbitrary detention and ethnic discrimination are either not respected or else are curtailed by other laws. Similarly, although Zaire has signed and in 1976 ratified the "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," these rights have frequently been violated. Student leaders have been arrested and authors of tracts and other publications criticizing the government have been arrested and detained for long periods without trial. Some former opponents of the government who have returned to Zaire under the auspices of the many amnesties which President Mobutu has granted for political exiles have also been detained and in a number of cases summarily executed. Finally, on two occasions in recent years members of the armed forces and civilians who have been accused of plotting against the Head of State have been arrested, summarily tried by military courts and imprisoned or executed.

Many suspected opponents of the government have been subjected to long term detention without charge or trial. They include people suspected of agitating against the government and others involved in rebel activities during the 1960's who have technically been pardoned by President Mobutu's amnesties. They also include others arrested for their membership in illegal religious sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses (known in Zaire as "Kitawalistes"). Detainees have no right to appeal against their detention.

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