‘No justification for the unjustifiable’: Lesotho’s ombud slams grand-scale torture, assault in Maseru prison

22 March 2024 · Carmel Rickard

Lesotho’s national ombud, Tlotliso Angelina Polaki, has issued a scathing report on massive-scale torture and assaults that took place in Maseru’s central correctional institution during December 2023, leaving about 95% of the inmates of the prison injured, one dead and one who is now wheelchair-bound and will never walk again.

The report (see below) by Lesotho's ombud, advocate Tlotliso Polaki, released this week, was headed, ‘No justification for the unjustifiable’.

In the report, she found the rights of prisoners held in Maseru's central correction institution were seriously violated by officers and staff on December 22, 2023 during a massive prison-wide search.

Almost all of the inmates had been beaten, injured and tortured for no good cause. One prisoner, who had escaped the day before, was beaten to death after he was found and brought back to the prison. Another prisoner, in prison for a month awaiting trial for malicious damage to property, must now spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair after his back was broken in the prison-wide attacks. The man, Tlotliso Bereng, 38, is an IT systems engineer with his own consultancy. The 'recruits' beat him so badly that they tore his bladder and dislocated his spinal cord. 'He will never walk again and has excruciating pain in his back.'

The ombud made a number of significant recommendations including disciplinary hearings and prosecution of the correctional services employees who carried out the assaults. She also made clear that compensation would have to be paid to the family of the prisoner who was killed and to Bereng, the man who has been left permanently disabled.

Polaki slammed the prison authorities for not allowing most of the injured prisoners access to medical treatment after the attacks, and for refusing to allow visits by family and legal representatives in the aftermath.

In her view, the visits were refused in order to allow the visible wounds on the prisoners’ bodies to heal before they were seen by ‘outside’ people. Some family members were so alarmed by the rumours they heard of what had happened in the prison that they asked the high court to issue a habeus corpus order.

The ombud further underlined the inadequate resources provided to correctional services. She said they worked under very difficult conditions. For example, some security cameras aren’t working despite being reported on several occasions, there aren’t the resources even to make reports on incidents that take place in the prison, the staff are not paid an adequate salary and other conditions of service are not satisfactory.

During her inspection, details of which are included in the 70-page report, Polaki discovered that staff were still operating in terms of colonial era regulations. She viewed footage of those videos that were working and conducted extensive interviews with prisoners and with staff, during which senior officers admitted that things had got out of control on December 22. However, she strongly criticised the senior officers because none of then had taken the initiative to call off the attacks and the blatant torture of inmates.

The events were sparked by the escape of several prisoners on December 21. Despite the escape, a pre-planned but unannounced search of all the inmates and their cells for contraband, went ahead the following day. The search was carried out by scores of ‘recruits’, employees who had worked for the prison service for years, but who hadn’t finally completed their training. One of the escaped prisoners was found, but after he was brought back, appears to have been beaten to death.

The ombud found that the ‘recruits’, possibly fired up by the escape, acted with deliberate provocation to ‘start a fight’ with the prisoners, and the senior officers did not stop them. She found there was a culture of silence among the senior officers and that they did not tell her the whole story.

Her conclusion was that there had been a ‘well-orchestrated plan’ to ‘torture and ill-treat inmates’. Although the main targets of the 'rescruits' seem to have been members of the Lesotho Defence Force, in prison awaiting trial, the attacks ‘spilled over’ to involve most of the rest of the prisoners as well.

Download Final Ombudsman Investigation Report - MCCI Inmate_240319_170711.pdf (1.2 MB)

Carmel Rickard

About the author

Recent articles by Carmel Rickard

Executive interference in Ugandan court decisions continues – this time by the justice minister

21 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Uganda’s minister of justice, Norbert Mao, has taken a leaf straight from the book of the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni. This week, the minister wrote to the principal judge of the Ugandan high court, asking that the judge directly intervene in a matter that has been brought to his attention by an MP on behalf of a constituent. Mao asked for the ‘immediate administrative intervention’ in the matter by the principal judge. Earlier this year, Museveni wrote a similar letter to the chief justice of Uganda, also requesting intervention in a matter, and the CJ later indicated that this was not the first time it had happened.

Major court decision on image rights benefits Ugandan soccer players

21 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Members of Uganda’s national soccer team from the period around 2007/8 have just been awarded a payout against MTN Uganda by the commercial court. The telecom giant had a year-long contract with Proline, the players’ originating development soccer club, allowing it to use the players’ images for advertising. But MTN had continued to use their images even after that contract expired on the basis that it had a sponsorship agreement with Fufa, soccer’s governing body in Uganda. The players then challenged MTN in court, through Proline, and have now won a significant damages award. But the judgment exposed some serious flaws in the way that Fufa has approached the question of using the image rights of its senior players, and the court commented that this is a ‘case study’ for why Fufa needs to sort out its contractual arrangements with senior players.

Is rape by family members treated too lightly by the law?

19 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

The high court has sent the case of a Malawian teenager, charged with raping his 89-year-old grandmother, back to the magistrate’s court for a possible re-trial because the court had wrongly prosecuted a case of rape instead of incest. If convicted in a re-trial, however, Malawi’s incest law could see the accused sentenced to a mere five years. Malawi’s penal code provides for a significant difference between the sentence to be imposed when a man rapes a close family member, and in a case where the two are not related. When they are unrelated, the code provides that a rape offender ‘shall be liable to be punished with death or with imprisonment for life’ (However, Malawi has had what amounts to a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty since 1992.) By contrast, ‘incest by males’, is categorised in the code as a ‘felony’, and anyone convicted ‘shall be liable for imprisonment for five years’. There is an exception: if it is proved ‘that the female person is under the age of 16, the offender shall be liable to imprisonment for life’.

Prominent SA advocates lose battle over conviction in Namibian courts for working without a permit, misleading immigration officials

6 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Two prominent South African advocates have just lost their last hope of squashing their convictions in the Namibian courts. Johannesburg advocates, Mike Hellens SC and Dawie Joubert SC, had been found guilty on two counts, first, working as legal practitioners without an employment permit, and second, giving false or misleading information to immigration officers when they entered the country in 2019. Though they had gone to Namibia to appear in court in a bail application, they told the immigration officials they were there for a ‘visit’ and for a ‘meeting’. Both appealed against their conviction but they had also asked for a judicial review of the decision. In the high court they lost their appeal but won on the review. The outcome in both matters were taken to the apex supreme court for a final word. In December 2023, they lost their appeal at the supreme court. What would that same court say when the state appealed against the review finding? The supreme court has now given its answer: it found the review, that had favoured Hellens and Joubert, was wrongly decided, and set it aside, awarding costs against the two advocates in both the high court and the supreme court.

Are the courts out of touch with the ordinary, and often poor, people they serve?

6 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

This is a question that readers can’t help asking, based on a contempt of court conviction and sentence by the magistrate’s court in Namibia. The case raises concerns about a lack of sensitivity and awareness of that court to the daily difficulties of poor people it serves. The accused in the case, Festus Shimmy, was sent to prison for three months because he wore ‘short pants’ to a court hearing and the magistrate convicted him of contempt of court for doing so. Explaining his attire, Shimmy told the court that his long trousers were very dirty and so he had worn the shorts. To make matters worse, his case was not sent to the high court on review ‘without delay’, as the law requires in contempt of court matters, but only arrived for review well after the three-month sentence had expired. This meant that even though the high court set aside his conviction and sentence, this came too late for Shimmy. Further, the high court pointed out that the magistrate imposed a fine of N$500, though the law clearly states the maximum is N$100.