The Centre for Accountability and the Rule of Law (CARL), with support from DFID’s Access to Security and Justice Programme (ASJP), is implementing a 15-month project titled, ‘Promoting Justice and Accountability in Sierra Leone’. The project’s goal is
to promote a fair, accessible and accountable justice system by influencing policy reform and better implementation of existing laws.
Against this backdrop, CARL organised the 1st Quarterly Seminar on the Criminal Justice System, with various stakeholders, including the Sierra Leone Police, Sierra Leone Prisons Service, Law Officers Department, and key non-state actors to discuss the state of the prisons and detention facilities in Sierra Leone, and develop an advocacy tool for the speedy enactment of the Correctional Services Bill.
The seminar highlighted the state of the country’s detention centres and the importance of the Correctional Services Bill. The goal of this Bill, if enacted, is to change the traditional practice of incarcerating offenders without due respect to their fundamental human rights and to ensure that while in detention, inmates are reformed, rehabilitated and reintegrated into society in order to prevent them from re-offending but contributing to the positive development of the state.
The discussions noted the critical challenges and key issues that should be considered in the ongoing criminal justice reforms:
Justice and Security Sectors: For the justice and security sectors, there is limited provision of material resourcesto perform their duties. For instance, the prison is currently experiencing overcrowding, poor detention facilities for women and children. There is inadequacy of recruitment, screening, poor conditions and ineffective trainings of personnel like the police and prisons service. Thus, it is imperative that the state should improve the criminal justice system by providing the necessary capacity in personnel, infrastructure, training and resources to do their work well.
The civil society: In the enactment of laws, there is lack of public participation and contribution. Thus, the civil society advocated a change to this practice, also stressed that the increase in the number of courts and police stations should have a corresponding increase in capacity of all detention facilities.
Participants: The ongoing criminal justice reform initiatives geared toward promoting and ensuring a human rights friendly environment was acknowledged. Significantly, AdvocAID; a civil society organisation mainly working with women in conflict with the law, said the Correctional Services Bill does not make provision for facilities for special case inmates like the physically challenged, and lactating and pregnant women.
Others raised critical issues like the need to have uniform sentencing guidelines for similar crimes; recruitment of more legal professionals in the Law Officers Department; allocation of adequate resources to the justice sector; infrastructural extension of the maximum prison; massive, aggressive public education and advocacy to enhance the knowledge of the criminal offenders; training and capacity building of correctional officers in human rights related issues; proper and effective electronic data management of inmates’ information and ensuring effective input of non-state actors before enactment of the Correctional Service Bill.The main apprehension is that given the complexion of the council, there is the tendency to compromise the independence, integrity and professionalism of the correctional centres.