Poor treatment of political prisoners alleged

The wife of detained opposition leader Hasan al-Turabi complained on Thursday to visiting UN human rights envoy Gerhard Baum that Turabi and other detainees were being mistreated in prison, and that orders had been given to "tighten measures" against her husband, AFP news agency reported on Friday, 5 October. Wisal al-Mahdi said she had informed the UN human rights rapporteur for Sudan that "there are no freedoms of expression, press or any other sort of freedom in the country," the report added. Turabi has been held in detention since February after his Popular National Congress (PNC) party signed a memorandum of understanding with the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which undertook to step up "peaceful popular resistance" in Sudan. Charges of attempting to undermine the constitution and waging war against the state against Turabi were dropped on Monday but he was still being kept in "precautionary detention" under Sudan's National Security Act, according to news reports. In a statement he issued after meeting Baum on Wednesday, Minister for Justice Ali Muhammad Uthman Yasin stressed his ministry's intention that there would be no political detainee without a charge, the official Sudanese News Agency (SUNA) reported. Yasin said he had told the rapporteur that the issues of freedoms, democracy and national reconciliation were guaranteed by the Sudanese constitution, and had asserted that there were no religious problems between Muslims and Christians in the country, SUNA added. Baum said on Wednesday that Sudan had made some progress in its record on human rights but that more needed to be done. "Progress has been achieved in some, but not all, human rights aspects," he said after talks with Yassin and Energy Minister Awad Ahmed al-Jaz. Baum is visiting Sudan form 2-16 October and is scheduled to submit a report on Sudan to the UN High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland, in November. Sudanese Energy Minister Awad Ahmed al-Jaz had denied, in talks with Baum, that local populations in the south had been displaced by oil exploration activities, according to news reports. Efforts were underway to develop and resettle oil areas in the south that had been depopulated by fear of flooding, with oil companies to provide health, educational, electricity and water services, according to al-Jaz.