"Without fear of making a mistake, our jails look like the former Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners are piled up in a capacity four times larger than normal," said this Thursday the Secretary General of the United and Revolutionary Youth of Angola (JURA), Agostinho Kamuango.
According to the politician of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the prison services in Angola are "precarious" and the jails in the country "are not centers of re-education or rehabilitation.
Agostinho Kamuango was among the more than a hundred young people and activists who participated in a demonstration on October 24 in Luanda, strongly repressed by the police, after which they were arrested for a week and summarily tried.
The demonstrators, already at large since last Sunday, were accused of crimes of disobedience, riot and destruction of material goods, and 71 were sentenced for disobedience.
Speaking this Thursday at a press conference, where he condemned the arrests and the police load, the JURA leader, who said he had been assaulted by police officers during the demonstration, announced that the youth were "subjected to torture".
"And many may carry with them injuries for life, due to the excesses of the police forces. It is important to mention that well-identified journalists were also tortured and forced to remain in their cells at all times," he said.
The prisoners and detainees, "no matter the crime for which they were accused", Agostinho Kamuango emphasized, shared the same space, "in an overcrowded, unsanitary condition, which leads to the appearance of many diseases".
"It is killing citizens little by little," he said, lamenting also the type of meal served to prisoners and detainees.
The Secretary General of JURA was also concerned about the "high number of minors in jails" aged between 12 and 15 who share the same space with adults.
For the UNITA politician, the situation of minors in jails "lacks a punctual response from the competent bodies", because, he noted, "the drama of these minors must worry society because it represents a threat to their future.
"The juvenile court does not seem to exist. It is not normal what is seen in jails. Where are the rehabilitation or re-education centers, where the INAC [National Institute for Children] and other human rights organizations are?
Kamuango also lamented the lack of logistical conditions at the level of the national police, considering it "unacceptable" that the police units do not have means of transportation to carry out their mission efficiently.
"The Ministry of the Interior, in the person of its minister, must do everything to reverse the situation. It is a shame and this reality also has repercussions on the precariousness of prisons in Angola," he said.
