Challenging our humanity

Challenging our humanity
By Editor
Friday April 04, 2008 [04:00]

There is still a lot that needs to be done in protecting and promoting human rights in Zambia. There may appear to be some advances made in the protection and promotion of human rights in Zambia. But when one looks at things critically, it will not be difficult to discern that whatever advances have been made, they are in respect of the rights of influential, well-to-do groups or classes. The human rights of the great majority of our people, especially the poor, still face considerable challenges and obstacles in their protection and promotion.

The poor, especially the rural poor, still have very limited access to education, health and other services that are needed in an organised community.

And when we talk about human rights, we are talking about the things that, in our opinion, constitute true humanitarianism, the policy of promoting the dignity of human beings and their well-being. We are talking about things that make citizens feel they count; they are part of society; they feel they have a national dignity and a homeland.

We believe that a nation’s human rights record should not necessarily or exclusively be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, its most privileged citizens, its most powerful citizens. It should however be judged by how it treats its weakest citizens, its lowest citizens, its least privileged citizens.

It is sometimes said that no one truly knows a nation until he or she has been inside its prisons. A nation’s record of human rights should also be judged by how it treats its prisoners – who happen to be at the lowest level of its weakest citizens.

And here in Zambia, we are treating our imprisoned sisters and brothers like animals. Let us work to increase the humanity of our fellow citizens who we have locked away in our prisons. Let us make sure that despite their incarceration, they should not be made to feel they are sub-human.

Let us show solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are in prisons. Let us not forget the fact that even if they have committed serious crimes against us, they are human beings whose human rights should still be protected and promoted; they are human beings deserving care, attention and love from all of us. Our laws were made for human beings, and our prisons were built for the imprisonment of human beings.

They were not meant for animals. We have no prisons in this country for animals, although sometimes we cage dangerous ones – we don’t imprison animals. We only imprison human beings but the imprisonment of human beings should never be allowed to reduce them to the status of animals.

A human being will always be a human being, regardless of the crimes they commit. Even those human beings who sometimes behave like animals, are still human and their rights should be respected.

It cannot be denied that our prison conditions are harsh – and as the Human Rights Commission has correctly observed - life threatening due to severe overcrowding, meager food supplies, inadequate sanitary conditions and so on and so forth. Outbreaks of tuberculosis and dysentery are common in our prisons.

Some of our prisons contain three or more times as many inmates as they had been designed to hold. Imprisonment and other measures which result in cutting of an offender from the outside world are afflictive by the very fact of taking from the person the right of self-determination, by depriving him of his liberty.

Therefore, our prison system should not aggravate the suffering and degradation of a human being in such situations. The purpose and justification for a sentence of imprisonment is ultimately to protect society against crime.

This end can only be achieved if the period of imprisonment is used to ensure that, so far as possible, upon his or her return to society, the offender is only willing to lead a law-abiding and self-supporting life. This is not possible if all that we do in our prisons is to break the prisoners, make them lose faith in humanity, including their own humanity.

We should therefore utilise all the remedial, educational, moral, spiritual and other forces and forms of assistance which are appropriate and available to help our prisons maintain and improve the human rights of our prisoners. We should seek to minimise any differences between prison life and life at liberty which tend to lessen the responsibility of the prisoners or the respect due to their dignity as human beings.

The medical services we provide to our prisoners should seek to detect and treat any physical or mental illnesses or any defects which may hamper a prisoner’s rehabilitation. All necessary medical, surgical and psychiatric services should be provided to that end. For these people, society has to provide because their incarceration means that they are not in a position to do anything for themselves.

The treatment of persons sentenced to imprisonment should have as its purpose, so far as the length of the sentence permits, to establish in them the will to lead law-abiding and self-supporting lives after their release and to fit them to do so. This treatment should be such as we encourage their self-respect and develop their sense of responsibility. We will also need to improve the way we treat prisoners awaiting trial – remand prisoners.

Persons arrested or imprisoned by reason of a criminal charge against them, who are detained either in police custody or in prison but have not yet been tried and sentenced, should be presumed to be innocent and treated as such. But our prisons hardly differentiate between a tried and convicted prisoner and a remand prisoner. They are both subjected to more or less the same treatment.

This is not just unfair, it is also unjust and inhuman. It is unfair, unjust, inhuman to imprison in that way a person who is presumed by law to be innocent until proven guilty. They should be allowed to benefit from their condition of being remand prisoners and as far as possible, be kept separate from convicted prisoners.

Therefore, as we analyse the 2007 state of human rights report in Zambia, let us do so in conformity to our belief in the unity of humankind. we should not pay exaggerated attention to the accidental differences within the human family and treat those who violate standards as animals deserving no respect and compassion – no human rights.

Let us work to extend solidarity to all our weak brothers and sisters – prisoners, the poor and the weak of our society. We say this because solidarity is a basic fact of human existence. No person is an island; cut off from others and self-sufficient. To deny any person their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.