Cuban dissidents held in "alarming conditions"

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP): Dozens of dissidents arrested last year in Cuba are being held in "alarming conditions", the special representative of the UN Commission on Human Rights for Cuba said Tuesday.

"Reports from various sources speak of alarming conditions of physical and moral detention" for several dissidents arrested and sentenced last March and April, the French jurist, Christine Chanet, wrote in a report released Tuesday.

The report will be submitted to the next session of the UN Human Rights Commission due to take place from March 15 to April 23. Every year, the commission votes on draft resolutions criticizing Cuban President Fidel Castro's regime.

"The detainees are frequently transferred from one detention center to others. They are put in very trying physical and psychological conditions either in solitary confinement or in dangerous promiscuity with common law delinquents," said Chanet, who was appointed to her post in January 2003.

"Some (detainees) are over 60 and suffer from chronic diseases," according to the report which lists 75 political activists arrested last year.

The arrest and sentencing of 75 anti-Castro dissidents to jail terms ranging from six to 28 years last April had touched off an international outcry.

Among them was poet and writer Raul Rivero, who got a 20-year jail sentence on charges of harming state security.

The Chanet report, based on contacts with human rights activists and third countries, noted that the Cuban detainees had been tried "during a very brief period, sometimes days, which did not give them enough time to prepare their own defense". 

Last June, Chanet had called on Castro to show clemency but got no response.

The Chanet report also slammed the April 2003 execution of three dissidents who tried to hijack a ferry to the United States and said the moratorium on the death penalty decided in 2000 should be maintained without exception.

It also called for "the revision of laws which allow penal sanctions against the exercise of freedoms of expression, protest, assembly and association".

Cuban authorities do not recognize the mandate of Chanet and have so far refused to meet her.

  Back...

  Most popular articles: viewed, printed and e-mailed

  Printable version