The Nation’s Penitentiary Ombudsman (PPN) presented this Monday – before the Permanent Bicameral Commission of the Ombudsman’s Office and both legislative chambers – its Annual Report corresponding to 2023. It is titled, “The situation of Human Rights in prisons Federal Penitentiary Service of Argentina”, the work recorded the current situation of the Federal Penitentiary Service (SPF).
They presented the annual report “on the situation of Human Rights in federal prisons in Argentina,” said Ariel Cejas Meliare, lawyer and acting deputy attorney of the PPN, to Time. He continued pointing out that they did so “in compliance with what is stipulated in article 25 of Law 25,875.”
For more than thirty years, “we have informed the Legislative Branch about the work we do,” remarked the acting deputy attorney general. He also elaborated that “we have been studying the problems that condition the validity of Human Rights in federal prisons and other places of detention where people deprived of liberty are held.”
Reception of the complaint
As they usually do, during 2023, “our teams made 1,184 visits to federal penitentiary establishments, of which 649 were located in the metropolitan area and 535 in the interior of the country,” explained Cejas Meliare.
The acting deputy prosecutor said that “during that period we received 15,241 complaints; 6,153 through the Complaint Center that we have and 8,389 were in person during the monitoring that we carry out from our organization,” he listed.
He clarified that the majority of the claims and complaints “are due to lack of access to the health system, also deficiencies in medical care that is sporadic and practically non-existent, denial of work and other activities, terrible material conditions of confinement, lack of access to justice, claims for arbitrary transfers and abrupt changes of accommodation.”
Overcrowding and overcrowding in prisons
This is a survey that accumulates and highlights the information “contained about the situation in police stations, wardens and other temporary detention centers,” said the acting deputy attorney general. The work shows how the different security forces “have to face a reality of exorbitant accumulation, because there are more and more detainees housed in their facilities who, furthermore, are not prepared for prolonged detentions,” he added.
Regarding the City Police, the lawyer assured that it is the security force “with the highest levels of overpopulation and overcrowding; other police agencies have also had to go through these problems.”
He went on to relate that – in the Report – different judicial interventions are presented “that we carried out from our organization through different actions that respond to the situation of overpopulation, the material conditions of detention and habitation, access to work, education and reintegration later of the release of detainees from prisons, police stations and wardens.”
With the work they have been carrying out uninterruptedly for more than three decades, “we reaffirm our commitment and fight in defense of the rights of people deprived of their liberty throughout the country,” he concluded.
You can read the complete Annual Report at this link.
