ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria's prisons are teeming with people who have waited years for trial in cramped and squalid cells, an international human rights group said Tuesday.
Most of the country's tens of thousands of prisoners have not been convicted, Amnesty International said in a new report on Nigerian jails. The report calls the nation's criminal justice system a "conveyer belt of injustice, from beginning to end."
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"The conditions Amnesty International saw and the stories we heard from inmates are a national scandal," the London-based group said.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation, with 140 million people, according to government census figures.
Of its 40,000 prisoners, at least 65 percent have not been convicted of the crime for which they are being held, Amnesty International said. And some have been waiting up to a decade for the outcome of their trials, according to the group.
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"The Nigerian government is simply not complying with national and international obligations when it comes to the criminal justice system and must begin to do so seriously and urgently," Amnesty International's Aster van Kregten said in a statement announcing the report's release.
The rights group said it shared its findings with Nigeria's government. Nigerian authorities have long acknowledged problems with police brutality, overcrowded jails and an often-corrupt court system. Periodically, the government has granted amnesties for prisoners who have been held for long periods.
"The Nigerian government is not unaware of most of the observations ... The various ongoing reform initiatives are intended to provide short-, medium- and long-term solutions to most of the nagging problems," Nigeria's Interior Ministry said in reply to the group's findings.
But Amnesty International said reforms recommended by various government commissions had not been acted upon.
Most prisoners are too poor to afford legal representation, and just one in every six has a private lawyer. There are only 91 lawyers available for free counsel in the country, the group said.
Criminality and corruption are major problems in Nigeria due to widespread poverty, despite massive earnings from Nigeria's oil industry, Africa's biggest.
The Amnesty International report characterized the overall state of prisons as "appalling," though it said conditions varied in the 10 prisons it visited last year. It said 80 percent of Nigeria's 144 prisons were built before 1950 — predating Nigeria's 1960 independence from Britain.
The report said overcrowding is a serious problem. One prison in Lagos was holding more than two times its official capacity. Often, more than a dozen prisoners are packed into a 56-square-foot cell, with only a bucket for a toilet, the rights group said.
Proper bedding was rare, with inmates sharing beds or sleeping on the floor, according to the report. Food, drinking water and health care were substandard, with the group noting that such conditions increased risks for spreading infection among prisoners.
Amnesty International said it found that some ailing inmates were only able to visit a medical clinic after bribing prison officials.
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