UN prison incident due to “communication breakdown”

Kenya’s Permanent Secretary in the home affairs ministry, Joshua Terer, on Friday blamed a “communication breakdown” for the failure of the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, Nigel Rodley, to gain access to the country’s Kamiti maximum security prison on the outskirts of Nairobi earlier this week.

“Our officers waited for him the whole day last Thursday [23 September], he did not show up,” Terer told IRIN. “So when he went to the prison on Wednesday [29 September], there was no officer to welcome him and obviously our junior officers could not let him in.”

He ruled out any “cover-up” attempt by the government, as alleged by Rodley. “If I cleared all other areas, how come I could not clear this one? Unless someone was just looking for an incident during the visit to talk about,” he said.

Terer said he allowed the rapporteur to visit facilities in Nakuru, Nairobi, Garissa and even Naivasha which “he did not go to”. “Who were we to say no to his visit to Kamiti? Whoever was coordinating his programme must have made the mistake. There was clearly a communication breakdown.”

Rodley said denying him access to Kamiti was “a flagrant breach of the terms of reference agreed for this mission”. He told journalists the agreement with the Kenyan government entitled him to go “wherever he wanted” regarding Kenya’s prisons and police stations. He was kept waiting at the Kamiti prison gate for 45 minutes only to be told that the decision to bar him had been taken by the commissioner of prisons.

“It is hard to imagine that if the authorities did not have something to hide they would have denied me access,” Rodley said. “They were playing a game, quite clearly.”

He said he had information that the prison population in Nakuru, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, had been substantially reduced before his arrival at the facility. He further said that he heard of a similar operation at the Kamiti prison, whereby thousands of prisoners were dispatched to other places. Rodley said he had heard that Kenyan prisons in general were “grossly overcrowded”. However, he had good access to police stations.

Rodley, who was in Kenya between 20-30 September, said one of his recommendations would be to open up Kenya’s prison system to the outside world. He said came to Kenya because over the years he had received allegations of torture that indicated it was “more than isolated and sporadic”.