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As the United Nations’ top investigator into torture and punishment prepares to end his term this year, he has focused on a group he has long called the globe’s “most vulnerable” to discrimination and to neglect. Detainees, says Manfred Nowak, have become the world’s forgotten.

The theme has become central to the Austrian professor’s six-year tenure as the special rapporteur on torture, and in the most recent session of the Human Rights Council last month he strongly reiterated his call for a new convention to protect detainees.

Where other forms of discrimination are strongly represented in global social movements, the plight of those considered “criminal” tends to raise much less interest and certainly less sympathy. Media coverage is sporadic. While it took sexually explicit photographs to raise interest in US-led abuses in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib, and a steep increase in suicides a few years ago in France (which remains infamous for its shabby prisons), headlines are even harder to make in many Asian countries. Here, accountability remains low and the death count in prison is generally high and poorly documented.

In Indonesia the issue flared up last year when a corruption task force discovered wealthy VIPs in a Central Jakarta prison who had been living in air-conditioned comfort for years, complete with LCD televisions and queen-sized beds, despite overcrowding in many of the country’s facilities. The minister of justice and human rights acknowledged last year that there were up to 130,000 inmates in prisons built for 80,000; audits are now being undertaken across the country. Indonesia has featured on watchdog lists for its treatment of the incarcerated for decades, as noted in Caveat, an Indonesian human rights e-journal, in a January article calling for transparency.

“Many of Indonesia’s prisoners are stripped of their rights,” it noted. They “are consequently forced to live in filthy, unsanitary conditions; become subject to disease; are placed under severe levels of stress due to overcrowding.”

A cry for attention by a small group of pretrial prisoners in Kandy, Sri Lanka, over Christmas last year was less successful. The men spent five days fasting on the roof of Bogambara Prison, where former inmates have reported that an average of 16 people are kept in cells built for one to two. The strikers were demanding that they either be tried or allowed bail, yet prison staff say they have instead been charged with violating prison rules and disturbing the peace.

“In general there is a belief or a mentality, even among judges and lawyers here, that the detainees deserve bad conditions as a kind of punishment, particularly those accused of being connected to the [Tamil Tigers] whether they’ve been convicted yet or not,” said a Kandy-based source in the field.

In short, there is widespread tolerance of the closed, often-murky machinations of prison systems. It has encouraged standards to creep toward and beyond the inhumane in much of Asia and the world. “As soon as they are behind bars, detainees lose most of their human rights and often are simply forgotten by the outside world,” Nowak told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

A similar point was made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in 2008. “Some rights [such as the right to liberty] are necessarily restricted by detention,” she wrote during a campaign to highlight the issue. “But regardless of the reasons why they have been deprived of their liberty, individuals in detention are more vulnerable to human rights violations. The protection of the rights of those in detention is often not deemed a priority by the public, which in turn can dampen government efforts to increase protection.”

Nowak’s recent reports to the UN have been drawn from his missions to 15 countries, including encounters with detainees in Nigeria penned in cells with more than a hundred other inmates and tortured in front of one another, and in Nepal and Sri Lanka where cells were so crowded that inmates couldn’t lie down to sleep at the same time.

Also significant was the evidence that staff in some places of detention such as police stations don’t provide inmates with the basics for survival. In Asia the role of feeding or clothing remand prisoners often falls to family members, with countless cases documented of the “trades” that result, involving goods from families being “taxed” by police or prison guards. Reports from social workers in Cambodian facilities speak of prisoners who must pay to shower, and from India, of those who must either pay staff to be produced in court or be detained indefinitely (if they don’t have access to a lawyer). Without money or family support, inmates can simply die, Nowak said, unless they abase themselves by performing “services” for other prisoners or staff in exchange for provisions.

In Burma, where the military junta still bars the Red Cross from its prisons, this situation is systematically exploited. According to the Asian Human Rights Commission and journalists at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, political prisoners are nearly always placed in prisons that are hundreds of kilometers from their hometowns and thus from any form of support.

In the Philippines, the question of detainees’ right to health came up in 2008 and 2009 with the deaths from tuberculosis of two remanded labor-rights activists. Melvic Lupe, 29, and Leo Paro, 25, had been fit two years ago when they were remanded in Cainta City Jail after striking against Karnation Industries and Export, a home-decor company. Their families accuse the prison authorities of criminal neglect, and say they have been unable to find out whether the men had been medically treated, or to obtain a medical report. Like many in their situation, the men had in essence been sealed away, though they had not yet even been convicted.

Indeed, thanks to immense delays in justice and widespread corruption, many of those imprisoned in developing countries have either not been subject to fair trials or been tried at all. According to the latest World Pretrial Imprisonment List, 2.5 million people were known to be held in pretrial detention (and other forms of remand imprisonment) throughout the world in October 2007 (and about another quarter of a million are held in the countries on which such data can’t be gathered).

In Bangladesh, the WPIL has documented that 68 percent of its prison population is such. In Thailand, it put the pretrial population at 33,000, and this number rises through Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines to India, where it rests at about 250,000 (though a decline is imminent now thanks to a initiative, announced in January, to release 135,000 “under-trials” in prisons across the country). The organization estimates China may be holding as many as 100,000 untried prisoners.

Nowak’s call for action this year extends to the judicial systems — to the funding and political will needed to get them functioning credibly — as a way of ensuring that prison conditions are checked and challenged regularly.

But his request for a convention is more specific. Unlike many of the existing international principles and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners, a convention would legally bind countries into a communication channel with experts on the issue; it would hold states regularly and comprehensively accountable if signed, and even if unsigned would encourage a measure of state self-reflection and review.

As Nowak’s five years or so of reports have shown, prisons tend to bring out the worst in people on both sides of the bars. Those who have lost their right to liberty — validly or not — need their remaining rights protected with even more vigilance.

Jo Baker is a Hong Kong-based journalist and program coordinator for the Asian Human Rights Commission.

Asia Sentinel