Prison conditions for juveniles set to improve

Pakistan's leading child rights organisation has started renovation work at the main juvenile prison facility in the provincial capital of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Peshawar. The physical condition of almost all 22 jails in the province is grim, a rights activist told IRIN, with little renovation work having been carried out in more than half a century in most cases. "This is a part of our overall programme to improve the living conditions of juveniles in prisons throughout the country by providing them with recreational facilities and improving drinking water and sanitation systems," Arshad Mehmood, deputy national coordinator of the child rights' body, the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), told IRIN from Peshawar. According to the SPARC official, out of a total some 256 juvenile prisoners in the NWFP, the juvenile section of Peshawar central jail houses some 193 children in three blocks. Here, renovation is going in with financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Jail conditions have long been a major concern for rights activists, since complaints regarding inadequate food, poor sanitation and lack of medical care in overcrowded jails are common, according to the 2004 annual report of a leading human rights body, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). According to an interior ministry report released in June 2004, 73 prisons in the country held more than 80,000 prisoners against a permitted capacity of 35,365 inmates. Given the prevailing conditions, the HRCP report said, riots erupted in about eight jails across the country on several occasion during 2004. Prisoners in Multan, Faisalabad, and Lahore jails went on hunger strike to protest against inhumane conditions in prisons and the provision of unhygienic food. As of December 2004, over 2,500 male juvenile offenders were imprisoned in various jails across the country, Mehmood said, noting, "the number of female juvenile inmates is not known since they are counted with adult female prisoners in all four provinces." The HRCP report appreciated the efforts of the government of Pakistan's most populous province of Punjab to improve the security system, health facilities and food provisions for the prisoners, besides constructing new blocks inside jails. Rights activists are hopeful about the improvement in jail conditions for both juveniles as well as adults. "Change is there, though at a slower pace, but we just need to put a consistent approach for further betterment," Mehmood noted.