I. Summary

I was under supervised residence ordered by the governor for a brawl I was involved in. Then, I took mother to the hospital and was 10 minutes late for reporting to the Ashrafiyya police station. They arrested me, kept me, and sent me to the governor the next day. At the Amman governorate, the cells are upstairs, on the top floor. I called my family and they came. The officials sent a paper to the governor downstairs and my family talked to him for a few seconds, then I was brought down to see him, but I didn’t speak. He gave no reason for my arrest. I presented my mother as my guarantor, but he rejected her. The governor set some amount I had to pay as a guarantee and ordered my detention.

I spent one month in Juwaida prison, where I sent faxes to the governor every day. Because of that, they transferred me to Swaqa prison. I have presented 25 petitions for release with a guarantee, with my wife, mother, father, and brothers acting as guarantors. If you don’t have [assets] yourself, you have to find someone with land and pay him a fee to present it as a bond, and then pay the government fees. We don’t have enough money for that. My family wanted to present a piece of land as my guarantee, worth 10,000 dinars [about US$14,000], and paid the government fees of around 0.8 percent, but I am still here. I have written many petitions for clemency.                               

—Wa’il Ahmad, Swaqa prison, August 21, 2007

Wa’il Ahmad, age 23, had already spent 70 days in administrative detention when he spoke with Human Rights Watch at Swaqa prison. His experience encapsulates many of the abuses inflicted on those subjected to Jordan’s administrative detention policies.

The government’s widespread use of administrative detention fundamentally undermines the rule of law in Jordan. Ministry of Interior officials abuse their powers of administrative detention to lock up persons in an arbitrary manner. These officials have at times detained persons despite judicial orders for their release. At other times, they have jailed persons whose administrative detention did not serve any of the stated purposes set out in the Crime Prevention Law, which authorizes the practice. In almost all instances, governors and district administrators, whom the law empowers to order administrative detention, violated the due process rights of those being detained.

More than one in five persons in Jordanian prisons is an administrative detainee. In 2008 executive officials ordered administration in 11,870 cases, the National Center for Human Rights reported.

The Crime Prevention Law of 1954 allows governors to start procedures against persons who are “about to commit a crime or assist in its commission,” those who “habitually” steal, shelter thieves, or fence stolen goods, and anyone who, if remaining at liberty, would constitute a “danger to the people.” Court verdicts and interviews Human Rights Watch conducted indicated that governors resort most frequently to this last provision.

Among those detained outside of the scope of the Crime Prevention Law are women and men in “protective” custody, and foreigners. Governors invoke the Crime Prevention Law—although it does not explicitly cover such situations—to place women in “protective” custody because family members, generally men, have threatened these women’s lives for perceived moral lapses. The authorities also sometimes indefinitely jail men administratively, ostensibly for their protection, if they face threats of tribal revenge. In both instances, governors stand the principles of justice on their head by punishing the victims instead of prosecuting those responsible for such threats. Authorities occasionally detain foreigners administratively when they lack proper identification or residency documents but cannot be immediately deported. Foreigners and women and men in protective custody remain detained indefinitely, and have no effective means of challenging their detention.

Officials have also used the law to jail personal enemies, to detain persons in order to secure the surrender of a wanted person, and to detain persons simply for acting outside local norms, such as women alone in public at night or in the company of men who are not their relatives, street vendors and beggars, and men suspected of drunkenness or with prior convictions.

The government applies administrative detention most commonly to circumvent the greater rights that Jordan’s ordinary Law of Criminal Procedure gives those arrested, and obligations that law places on the arresting authority, such as bringing a suspect to the prosecutor within 24 hours of arrest to be charged. Governors frankly acknowledged to Human Rights Watch that they administratively detain persons who have been granted judicial bail or who have finished their criminal sentences. One governor went so far as to declare, “We use the Crime Prevention Law ... in cases where the criminal might be found not guilty.... [W]e know he’s a danger but we cannot [otherwise] put him in jail. We administratively detain him for as long as we consider necessary.” In one cell in Qafqafa prison, 20 out of 24 inmates under administrative detention said they were there despite having been found not guilty, having posted judicial bail, or after the expiry of their criminal sentences.

The Crime Prevention Law has serious deficits affecting due process protections. First, governors have complete discretion to set the monetary guarantee a suspect must present to remain free, irrespective of the suspect’s means or personal circumstances; governors also are free to reject guarantors who personally vouch for the suspect or pay the requested guarantee. Second, the law inverts the presumption of innocence by obliging the suspect to convince the governor why he or she should remain at liberty, and imposes only vague standards of evidence—not observed in practice—on the governor before he sets guarantees or orders detention. Finally, the law provides for no regular review by a court or an independent tribunal of administrative detention decisions. Detainees have the right to petition the High Court of Justice, but the associated costs are often prohibitive.

Moreover, governors and other high officials often apply the Crime Prevention Law in ways that violate the procedures set forth in that law. For example, in several cases the administrative detainees had never been brought to the offices of the governor or his deputy, despite the law’s requirement that the responsible official investigate the suspect’s case in his or her presence. Some detainees also said that officials refused to accept the guarantors and monetary guarantees that they themselves had set as a condition for the suspect’s remaining at liberty.

Gender-specific discrimination in the application of the law has additional consequences for women in administrative detention. Governors typically insist that only a male family member can act as a guarantor for a woman in protective custody, yet quite likely this relative had been involved in the threats that led to her original detention. To insist that the same male family members who threatened the woman with violence be the only acceptable guarantors to secure a woman’s release is to seal her fate of indefinite detention or expose her to violence upon her release. The only other way for women to be released from detention appears to be marriage, and governors have suggested marriage to unknown men, again violating women’s human rights—the right to enter into marriage of her own free will.

In response to indefinite administrative detention, detainees often go on hunger strike to gain attention. Prison directors confirmed to Human Rights Watch that hunger strike forces the governorate to review the detainee’s file, and often succeeds in securing the detainee’s release. However, prison officials only allow “dry” hunger strikes—that is, they deny striking prisoners access to liquids, even if that is not the inmate’s request, in violation of international standards governing the treatment of prisoners. In the absence of effective means for administrative detainees to challenge the lawfulness of their detention, painful “dry” hunger strikes have been their only recourse to calling attention to and in some cases remedying their plight.

International human rights law permits administrative detention only under narrow circumstances. In Jordan, however, officials primarily use administrative detention for matters that fall squarely within the application of existing criminal law, with the acknowledged intent of avoiding the legal requirement, under the country’s criminal procedure code, of subjecting the grounds for detention to the scrutiny of an independent and qualified justice system. As such, the Crime Prevention Law subverts the rule of law by granting executive officials powers that should properly be the domain of the judiciary.

Human Rights Watch recommends that Jordan repeal the Crime Prevention Law because of its broadly worded provisions and consistently arbitrary application, which has the effect of undermining Jordan’s claims to uphold the rule of law.