Josefa Nata claims Fiji’s prison system is perpetuating what he describes as a “dark culture” of cover ups of the abuse of prisoners’ rights, including uninvestigated deaths, and has met with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka to relay the need for a reform of the prison system.
“The prison management spends a good portion of their time covering up. They go to the extent of stopping calls to relatives, stopping visitations, all of which could be avoided if there is a normal process of reporting in place, followed by proper investigations, preferably by independent investigators instead of prison officers doing the investigation,” Nata told Islands Business.
“The [internal] Board of Inquiry is a joke. They come from head office and you see them laughing and joking [among themselves]. Witnesses are transferred to other prisons, including both prisoners and officers, so when the police or the military come to investigate, the witnesses are gone.”
Nata says civil society organisations need to get involved because by the time the reports get to the Fiji Human Rights Commission, the prison management “have already got their story”.
He claims there is corruption, ration clerks selling off prisoner provisions, smuggling, officers getting meals from prisoner rations, and drunkenness on duty.
