BEHIND THE RED LINE
Political Repression in Sudan

Human Rights Watch/Africa
Human Rights Watch

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Copyright © May 1996 by Human Rights Watch.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-75962
ISBN 1-56432-164-9

This report was researched and written by Human Rights Watch Counsel Jemera Rone. Human Rights Watch Leonard H. Sandler Fellow Brian Owsley also conducted research with Ms. Rone during a mission to Khartoum, Sudan, from May 1-June 13, 1995, at the invitation of the Sudanese government. Interviews in Khartoum with nongovernment people and agencies were conducted in private, as agreed with the government before the mission began. Private individuals and groups requested anonymity because of fear of government reprisals. Interviews in Juba, the largest town in the south, were not private and were controlled by Sudan Security, which terminated the visit prematurely. Other interviews were conducted in the United States, Cairo, London and elsewhere after the end of the mission. Ms. Rone conducted further research in Kenya and southern Sudan from March 5-20, 1995. The report was edited by Deputy Program Director Michael McClintock and Human Rights Watch/Africa Executive Director Peter Takirambudde. Acting Counsel Dinah PoKempner reviewed sections of the manuscript and Associate Kerry McArthur provided production assistance.

This report could not have been written without the assistance of many Sudanese whose names cannot be disclosed.

GLOSSARY xi

1 SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS 1

2 ARBITRARY ARREST AND ADMINISTRATIVE OR PREVENTIVE DETENTION 28

THE APPLICABLE LAW 28

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1995 33

THE REALITY 38

THE ROLE OF THE SUPREME COURT 38

TREND TOWARD RESTRICTION OF RIGHTS 41

PROLONGED ARBITRARY DETENTION 43

ARRESTS OF SADIQ AL MAHDI

AND UMMA PARTY MEMBERS 45

MASS RELEASES OF MAY 1995 AND AUGUST 1995 47

OTHER ARRESTS: 1995 AND 1996 49

NO ICRC ACCESS TO PERSONS DETAINED IN

CONNECTION WITH THE CONFLICT

(PRISONERS OF WAR) 51

DAILY REPORTING AS A FORM OF HARASSMENT 53

3 TORTURE AND DEATH IN DETENTION 55

THE APPLICABLE LAW 55

SECURITY DETENTION FACILITIES AND

CONDITIONS OF DETENTION 61

Ghost Houses 61

CITIBANK GHOST HOUSE BEFORE MARCH 1995 62

"CLOSING" OF CITIBANK GHOST HOUSE IN MARCH 1995 67

Kober Prison Security Facilities 67

Other Places Of Detention 70

DEATHS IN DETENTION 71

TORTURE AND CRUEL, INHUMAN

OR DEGRADING TREATMENT 74

4 IMPUNITY 79

CASES OF IMPUNITY 80

Torture of Brig. (Ret.) Mohamed Ahmed

al Rayah al Faki 80

Abd al Hafiz Ahmed al Bashir 83

Abdul Wahab al Beshir 85

Faisal Hassan Omar 87

Relief Agency Employees and Others: Juba, 1992 88

CASES IN WHICH CONVICTIONS HAVE BEEN

UPHELD OR ARE BEING REVIEWED 90

Yousif Ali Yousif 90

Al Juzuuli Idris Abdulmajid 91

5 FUNDAMENTAL FAIRNESS IN THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM AND THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE 93

THE APPLICABLE LAW 94

FAIR TRIAL 96

Military Tribunals 96

Summary Execution of Twenty-Eight Officers

Tried by Military Tribunal in 1990 96

Other Military Tribunal Cases 98

Civilian Court: The Explosives Case 100

DEATH PENALTY 103

Death Sentences in Civilian Courts 103

Death Sentences in Military Tribunals 106

Conditions of Executions 107

PRISON CONDITIONS 108

The Kober Prison Population 108

Political Prisoners 110

Transfers of Political Prisoners 111

Omdurman Prison for Women 112

Conditions Deteriorate at Omdurman Prison;

Prisoner Releases 114

CONFISCATION WITHOUT DUE PROCESS

IN SECURITY CASES 115

THE LAW AND THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE 117

6 POLICING SOCIETY 127

PUBLIC ORDER AND BEHAVIOR POLICE

AND THE LAWS THEY ENFORCE 129

Abuses by Public Order and Behavior Police 132

Public Order Courts 133

CREATION AND POWERS OF THE PEOPLE'S

POLICE FORCE 135

People's Police Force Compared to the Regular Police 137

DEPLOYMENT OF COMPREHENSIVE SECURITY POLICE 137

Abuses by Deployment of Comprehensive

Security Police 138

ABUSES BY NIF MASS ORGANIZATIONS AND

NEIGHBORHOOD GROUPS 139

ABUSES BY THE CENTRAL RESERVE FORCE

AND OTHER UNITS OF THE REGULAR POLICE 140

7 POLITICAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS 142

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND THE PRESS 142

The Applicable Law 142

Controls Before the 1993 Press Law 145

The 1993 Press and Printed Materials Law 146

Suspension and Closure of Newspapers and Detention

of Their Owners and Journalists 151

Restrictions on Journalists and Writers 157

The Arrest of Sadiq al Mahdi and

Free Speech in Mosques 158

Attacks on Clandestine Presses, Universities

and Other Unauthorized Fora 159

Access to Foreign News and Fax Machines 161

Lack of Remedy for Unauthorized Confiscation

of Printed Materials 162

FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION 163

The Applicable Law 163

The Government's Derogation from the Right to

Freedom of Association 166

Political Parties 168

Trade Unions and Professional Associations 172

Government Trade Union Legislation 175

Other Nongovernmental Associations 178

Violations of Freedom of Association 179

RIGHT OF PEACEFUL ASSEMBLY AND THE CONDUCT

OF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN

CONTROLLING DEMONSTRATIONS 181

The Applicable Law 182

Relatives of Twenty-Eight Officers Demonstrate 184

Police Violence During Evictions and

Demolitions of Squatter Settlements 188

Student Demonstrations and Police Conduct 192

FREEDOM OF RELIGION 193

The Applicable Law 202

Christians 204

Arrest of Church Leaders 205

The Attempt to Register Churches

as "Voluntary Societies" 209

Church Construction and Demolition 211

Church Schools and Teaching of

Religion in Government Schools 213

Religion in Prisons 216

Muslims 216

RIGHT TO MOVEMENT 220

The Applicable Law 221

Travel Bans on ex-Security Detainees 223

The Travel Ban Imposed on Human Rights

Activist Dr. Ushari Mahmud 223

Internal Movement 225

Human Rights Watch's and Other

Foreigners' Experience in Juba

and Other Garrison Towns 227

Restrictions on Travel Abroad 229

Attendance at Conferences Abroad 231

Women 232

STUDENTS' FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION AND

EXPRESSION RIGHTS AND POLICE CONDUCT 232

Student Demonstrations in September 1995 232

Detentions Following Demonstrations, and Due Process 239

Further Targeting of Ahliya University 242

Background: The University of Khartoum 246

SQUATTERS AND INTERNALLY DISPLACED

PERSONS IN KHARTOUM 252

Due Process Rights for Squatters and Displaced 254

Lack of Due Process in Relocation from Khoder,

October 1994, and Other Sites 258

Popular Committees and Freedom of

Association: Angola 265

NATIONAL SERVICE AND POPULAR DEFENSE FORCES 268

National Service 269

The Popular Defense Forces Militia 273

Tribal PDFs 274

Controlling Minority Populations 280

PDF Training 281

Students in the PDF 284

Civil Servants, Doctors, Women

and Tribal Leaders 287

Prisoners 290

Mass Mobilizations 291

8 ABUSES BY ALL PARTIES IN THE WAR 293

THE APPLICABLE LAW 298

VIOLATIONS BY GOVERNMENT ARMY AND MILITIA 306

Bombing 306

Taking Children and Women Slaves as War Booty 307

The Government's Garrison Towns 315

Government Militia 318

VIOLATIONS BY THE REBEL FORCES 323

Nuer/SSIA Attack Akot in October 1994, Killing 106 323

SPLA-aligned Raiders Attack Ganyliel in

July 1995, Killing 210 325

The Forcible Disappearance of Dr. Karlo Madut 327

Looting and Taking Hostages by All

Parties to the Conflict 330

Looting of Relief Barge and Holding Crew and

Relief Personnel Hostage in May 1995 331

Doctors Captured in Upper Nile by Government

and Released in Exchange for

SPLA Hostages, May-June 1995 334

Combatants Captured by the SPLA and SSIA 338

Lafon Declaration Purportedly Grants Amnesty to

Both Sides in Faction Fighting 340

SSIM/A Court Martials Struck down by Convention 340

SPLA and Looting in Labone: the Duty to Investigate 342

Ansar Sudanese Muslim religious sect headed by Sadiq al Mahdi; base of the banned Umma Party

Ansar al Sunna a traditional Islamic sect calling for the revival of the traditions of the prophet Mohamed

Anya-Nya the southern Sudanese rebel army of the first civil war, 1955-72

Anya-Nya II rebel south Sudanese forces who, together with former members of the Sudanese army, formed the SPLA in 1983; also, some of those forces that defected from the SPLA later in 1983 and became a militia force of Nuer in Upper Nile province supported by the Sudanese government; several Anya-Nya II groups over the years were wooed back to the SPLA

Baggara Arabized tribes of western Sudan; their name means cattle herders

Citibank Ghost House a secret detention facility run by Sudan Security, called "Citibank" because it was in a house behind the high-rise office building where Citibank used to have its Khartoum office

DUP Democratic Unionist Party, junior partner in several 1986-89 coalition governments, associated with the Khatmiyya traditional Islamic sect and its spiritual leaders, the Mirghani family

Dawa Islamiyya large Islamic nongovernmental organization that engages in relief work in over fifteen African countries

Dinka a southern Nilotic people originating in Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile

E.U. European Union

"ghost house" secret place of detention

hudud - offenses of six major offenses in Islamic law with penalties prescribed in fixed terms in the Qur'an or the Sunna (traditions of the prophet Mohamed)

Hunger Triangle a name adopted by relief organizations in 1993 for the area defined by Kongor, Ayod, and Waat, in Upper Nile province, where hunger was especially acute

ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross

ILO International Labor Organization

jihad holy war

Khatmiyya Sudanese Muslim religious sect headed by Mohamed Osman al Mirghani; base of the banned Democratic Unionist Party

mujahedeen holy warriors or participants in jihad

murahiliin Arab tribal militias

NGO Nongovernmental organization

NIF National Islamic Front, the militant Islamist political party which came to power in 1989 after a military coup overthrew the elected government

National Assembly legislative body as of March 1996

National Service agency within the ministry of defense responsible for conscripting men who under law are obliged to serve one or two years in the armed forces

Nuba the African people living in south Kordofan's Nuba Mountains; some are Muslims, some Christians, and some practice traditional African religions

OFDA Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, within the U.S. Agency for International Development

OLS Operation Lifeline Sudan, a joint United Nations/NGO relief operation for internally displaced and famine and war victims in Sudan which began operations in 1989. It serves territory controlled by the government and by the SPLA. Much of its work in southern Sudan is through cross-border operations conducted by OLS' Southern sector based in Nairobi.

PDF Popular Defense Forces, a government-sponsored militia

RASS Relief Association of Southern Sudan, the relief wing of Southern Sudan Independence Movement

SPLA-United the name that SPLA dissidents adopted after they united on March 27, 1993, until their organization was renamed in October 1994 as Southern Sudan Independence Movement/Army

SPLA-United rebel movement formd by Dr. Lam Akol after his (Western Upper Nile) February 1994 expulsion from SPLA-United, based in Tonga, Upper Nile

SPLM/A Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army, the political organization and army of the Sudanese rebels formed in 1983, of which John Garang is chairman

SRRA Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association, relief wing of the SPLM/A

SSIM/A Southern Sudan Independence Movement/Army; this is the faction of the SPLA, led by Cmdr. Riek Machar Terry Dhurgon, that broke away from the SPLM/A and Dr. John Garang's leadership in August 1991. It was based in Nasir, Upper Nile, and for a time was referredto as "SPLA-Nasir;" on March 27, 1993, others joined it and it was renamed "SPLA-United." In November 1994, it was renamed Southern Sudan Independence Movement/Army

Three Towns Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North; their combined population is estimated at four million

Toposa southern Equatorian people originating in the Kapoeta area of eastern Equatoria

Transitional National legislative body until March 1996

Assembly

Triple A camps displaced persons camps in Ame, Aswa and Atepi created in 1992 in Eastern Equatoria and evacuated in 1994 due to government military advances

UNDP United Nations Development Program

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF United Nations Children's Fund

Umma Party a banned political party which was the senior mainstream political party in the coalition governments between 1987-89, associated with the traditional Islamic sect of the Ansar and its spiritual leaders, the Mahdi family

WFP World Food Program

Violation of political and civil rights in Sudan remains the norm almost seven years after the elected government was toppled by a military coup backed by the National Islamic Front (NIF) party. A state of emergency was imposed on the date of the coup, June 30, 1989, which has never been lifted. The transitional constitution of 1985 was abolished and although elections for president and some members of the assembly were held in 1996, these elections were held without political parties, which remained banned since the 1989 coup, and in a climate of denial of basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and association, with the threat of arbitrary arrest by an ever-present security apparatus and detention with possible torture or ill-treatment. The limits to political participation were bluntly described by President (Lt. Gen.) Omar Hassan al Bashir in a January 1996 speech, where he said, "When we talk of handing power to the people, we mean the people will be within certain limits but no one will cross the red lines which are aimed at the interest of the nation."1 This anomalous situation provides no effective protection for human rights.

When President al Bashir warned that "no one will cross the red lines," he was commenting on a lecture that Abel Alier, a prominent southern politician and former vice-president of Sudan, gave to a university audience on the sensitive issue of self-determination for southern Sudan, the non-Muslim and non-Arab third of the national territory where oil resources lie. Self-determination is off-limits for discussion even though the country has been involved in a civil war for much of the period since independence in 1956 (with the exception of eleven years from 1972-83 when the south had autonomy). The rebels, mostly southerners and including Christians and practitioners of traditional African religions, and Muslims from the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan, belong in large part to the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) led by Cmdr.-in-Chief John Garang. The rebel SPLM/A controls substantial territory in the south, which is about three times the size of neighboring Uganda. Sudan is the largest country - 2.5 million square kilometers - in Africa. Although the SPLM has demanded a "united, secular Sudan" since 1983, that goal has been eroded within the south in favor of demands of independence.

Long-standing complaints of southerners about discrimination against them in the north and under northern rule in the garrison towns of the south - onthe grounds of religion, ethnic origin, language, and race - have not been heeded nor seemingly understood by the northern political class, traditionally composed

of those riverain Sudanese who define themselves as Arab. Sudan, with a 1992 population estimated at 26.7 million, is one of the most diverse countries in the world. According to the 1956 census (the only one which included ethnic origin), there were nineteen major ethnic groups and 597 subgroups in Sudan. In 1956 those who identified themselves as Arabs formed the largest ethnic group, at 40 percent of the population, followed by Dinka (12 percent), Beja (7 percent), and West Africans (6 percent). Islam is the state religion but only about 60 percent of the population are Muslims. Christians account for 4 percent of the national total (15 percent of the southern population), and traditional religions the rest.2 The official language, Arabic, is spoken by about 60 percent of the population. There are over 115 tribal languages, of which over twenty-six are spoken by more than 100,000 people.3

Since 1989, when the present government took power through a military coup, the diversity of Sudan's peoples has not been respected or encouraged, although prior governments did not have a good track record on respect for diversity either. Unlike previous governments, however, the NIF's stated aspiration is to create an Islamic state with one language, Arabic, and one religion, Islam - although it hedges on the rights of religious minorities. For instance, Minister of Education Kabashour Kuku announced in 1995 that the government would introduce changes in the school curriculum aimed at bringing up children according to the tenets of Islam and requiring Arabic as the language of instruction in all parts of Sudan, including the south where the majority of the population is non-Muslim and where the medium of instruction has been the vernacular or English.4 International human rights norms which require protection and respect for religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic and other minorities, and forbid discrimination on such grounds, are routinely violated in the course of government efforts to impose conformity on the population.

Arbitrary arrests

The National Security Act of 1995 provides for prolonged arbitrary detention in "security" cases of up to six months without judicial review, with

detainees in the custody of Sudan Security, in violation of international standards prohibiting arbitrary arrest and detention. The government has also misrepresented the status of this law to the U.N. It said in its November 1995 response to the U.N. human rights report that the 1992 National Security Act was in effect, and failed to disclose that it was replaced by a more restrictive act signed into law in May 1995.

The new 1995 law was quickly applied that month to detain arbitrarily the former prime minister and leader of the banned Umma Party and the Ansar sect on which it is based, Sadiq al Mahdi, on account of a speech he gave during the religious holiday Al Eid in which he criticized the NIF and the government. The violation of Sadiq al Mahdi's right to free expression was followed a week later by mass detentions of other Umma Party leaders. These detainees were released, never having been charged, in August; the time the prisoners spent in incommunicado detention appeared designed to remind the party, its leader, and Sudanese civil society that there was a certain "red line" beyond which criticism would not be tolerated.

Many other mass and individual arrests followed in the same fashion, of students during the September 1995 demonstrations and of suspected political opponents and those believed to be in league with the northern armed rebel movement based in Eritrea in late 1995 and early 1996.

Torture and death in detention

Detention conditions, especially for Sudan Security detainees, violate international law and standards requiring safeguards against torture, "disappearance," and unlawful detention. Detainees are regularly held for interrogation and prolonged detention incommunicado, often in unacknowledged detention places known as "ghost houses." These places of detention are administered by Sudan Security, which also is responsible for the interrogation of the detainees, with no supervision by the courts or other independent authorities with power to order a release of the detainees, in violation of international standards.

Mohamed al Fatih Abdel Moneim Taifor died in suspicious circumstances in July 1995 while in the custody of Sudan Security in Khartoum: fellow detainees reported hearing his cries as he was beaten the night he died.

These "ghost house" torture centers became so notorious that in March 1995 the government greatly remodeled the notorious "Citibank" ghost house,located near the former Citibank branch office in Khartoum, transferring the sixty detainees held there to a specially-renovated section of Kober Prison in Khartoum North. The special section at Kober was under the jurisdiction of Sudan Security. Despite the notoriety of the "ghost houses," political detainees continued to be taken back and forth from Kober, and some were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment during interrogation in these ghost houses.

Although it appears that torture is not used as routinely as it was in the early years of this government, it has not been abandoned. The worst reports of torture and ill-treatment continue to come from the war zones and border areas. A former rebel boy soldier who wanted to leave Khartoum and return to southern Sudan in 1995 was stopped at Kosti, the northern Nile river terminal for the trip south, when he tried to board a barge. Military intelligence agents arrested him because he did not have a travel permit. After interrogation they handed him over to Sudan Security in Kosti, where he was subjected to further questioning and severe torture. Sudan Security agents burned his naked back and body, among other things.

Impunity

The lack of prosecution of Sudan Security agents and army personnel for torture and murder continues to be the norm, with some few exceptions. As of June 1995, the conviction of only one army soldier - not an officer and not a Sudan Security member - was upheld by the Supreme Court during the year for unlawfully killing a civilian at a checkpoint. Other similar convictions were still pending Supreme Court review. An announced pardon of thirty-seven military personnel on August 31, 1995, may, however, have resulted in the release of the Sudan Security and army personnel in jail for abuses against civilians in June 1995.

Torture has been tolerated by the courts in a virtual guarantee of impunity. Testimony and medical examinations established at trial that the defendants in a high-profile 1994 case (known as the "Explosives Case") had been tortured, but the court violated international standards when it admitted the confessions in evidence and used them to convict the defendants. Moreover, it took no steps to initiate criminal prosecutions of the torturers. This case was doubly offensive since one of the torturers identified in court - Abd al Hafiz Ahmed al Bashir - had been accused of an arbitrary checkpoint killing a year earlier; had he been suspended from his job then, he would not have been able to engage in torture in 1993.

Nor has the government lived up to its obligations under international law to undertake a prompt and impartial investigation of serious torture allegations in the case of Brig. (Ret.) Mohamed Ahmed al Rayah al Faki. Brig. al Rayah was detained in 1991 and with several others convicted of a coup attempt. He filed acomplaint of torture while he was still in jail, and as a result was not released in the release of political prisoners in August 1995. The government, through various agents, tried to persuade him to withdraw his complaint several times, but he refused. He was finally released in February 1996, having been punished by spending six months in jail beyond the time his peers, who did not file any torture complaints, served. His complaint remains uninvestigated.

The future impunity of Sudan Security agents has been further reinforced. The National Security Act as now amended bars all civil and criminal actions against Sudan Security members for anything they did during their employment, unless the agency's director gives prior approval in cases where the conduct was not related to employment. Under this law, torture conducted in the course of employment is not actionable.

Fundamental fairness in the judicial system

The Sudanese judicial system, which in the past has capably defended fundamental rights using Sudanese law, has been weakened by the perennial inability of the body politic to agree upon a constitution, three military coups that suspended basic rights and ruled by decree, and the difficulty of transition, starting in 1983, of the legal system from one based on the British system to one based on Islamic law, shari'a.

Immediately after the June 1989 military coup, the de facto government dismissed some fifty-seven judges. Others in the judiciary were winnowed out after that. New judges purportedly sympathetic or loyal to the NIF were recruited. When the number of states was increased to twenty-six, more new judges were appointed to fill the increased need in the states.

In September 1995, the government announced that it was creating a committee to review the cases of all those who were "sent into retirement for the public interest" after the 1989 coup. Whether any dismissed judges will be reinstated bears watching.

The death penalty is still in use, and executions continue. It is difficult to know what the rate is since military tribunals, which appear to use the death penalty much more frequently than the civilian courts, do not make their proceedings public. It appears that justice is much more summary and rendered with considerably fewer procedural safeguards in military tribunals than in civilian courts, often with no advocate or counsel permitted, and no effective appeal from a death sentence. This summary "justice" violates due process and excludes the additional safeguards required by international standards in death penalty cases, which standards are designed to minimize the possibility of error. Human Rights Watch opposes executions under law whenever and wherever carried out,irrespective of the crime and the legal process leading to the imposition of the death penalty, because of its inherent cruelty.

Even though some military tribunal sentences have been softened by executive action, substituting life sentences for the death penalty, and ultimately in some cases by pardons, the summary military trial and execution of twenty-eight army officers and others in 1990 (for an attempted coup) still stands out as an abuse without remedy. The government has never released any information about the trials, nor has it even disclosed the burial place of those officers.

Military tribunals also were responsible for the summary executions of many persons, civilian and military, in Juba in 1992 after the SPLA military incursion into that southern city. There has never been an accounting of any of these trials nor a disclosure of where the bodies are buried. It appears that in many cases there were no trials at all before executions. Several hundred persons remain unaccounted for, and the investigation frequently promised by the government has never materialized. These reported unacknowledged detentions should be considered disappearances.

The right to due process and privacy has been arbitrarily denied by Sudan Security when it confiscates homes and other property belonging to political detainees, in some cases without any written order; in other cases it has not returned the property, even after acquittal. Some property is reportedly kept and used by Sudan Security.

Freedom of expression and the press

The government of Sudan told the United Nations in November 1995 that freedom of expression has been guaranteed by the Press and Printed Materials Law and there are many daily newspapers where opinions different from those of the Government are freely expressed. Although under the 1993 press law a few more independent newspapers have been allowed to open, several of those have since been closed, their presses confiscated, and their owners and journalists arrested. In many other cases, following hard on the publication of critical articles the government disliked, publications have been closed for periods of time. The government has enforced stringent financial and ownership requirements under the press law to close newspapers that criticize the government. Some newspapers published before June 1989 have not been permitted to reopen since they were banned.

In June 1995, the independent Akhir Khabar (Latest News) published an editorial highly critical of the 1993 Press and Printed Materials Law which the publisher said threatened small independent papers like his with extinction. This editorial followed the publication, in May 1995, of an interview with newspaperowner Mahjoub Erwa about his 1994 arrest and the government confiscation of his newspaper, Al Soudani al Doulia. The Press and Publications Council established under the press law ordered Akhir Khabar off the streets for two weeks in July 1995 and on January 18, 1996, the council ordered Akhir Khabar's permanent closure, accusing it of publishing articles it said "incited animosity, social disintegration and a spirit of intolerance." Its publisher said the real reason the paper was closed was because it had announced that it intended to publish a serialized interview with former elected Prime Minister Sadiq al Mahdi. The council also decided to bar the same publisher's forthcoming Sabah Al Kheir (Good Morning) newspaper. The publisher accused the government of banning these newspapers to keep them out of the debate preceding the March 1996 elections. These permanent closures are restrictions on the press that go far beyond what is permissible under the free expression guarantees in international human rights law.

Several newspapers published during the 1986-89 period of multiparty government have never been permitted to reopen after they were banned in 1989 at the time of the coup. Journalists believed to be associated with the Umma Party's underground Sawt El Umma (Voice of the Nation) newspaper were detained and grilled about the paper in November 1994. A man suspected of coordinating Al Maidan, the underground journal of the banned Sudan Communist Party (SCP), was detained in April 1995 and held in a "ghost house" then in the Sudan Security section of Kober Prison for a total of four months of warrantless incommunicado detention. Following the large street demonstrations in September 1995, at least thirteen journalists were arrested on suspicion of publishing Al Shabiba, the underground journal of the Sudan Youth Union, affiliated with the SCP.

There are limits, vaguely admitted by the government, on what the press can publish in Sudan. These limits shift. Notwithstanding the press closures described above, during the March 1996 elections these limits appeared to be slightly relaxed, and the Sudanese press - with the exception of those newspapers already suspended or permanently closed - jumped into the electoral fray with articles harshly criticizing the ruling party. This freedom is not considered a right, however, and it remains to be seen if the banned newspapers will be reopened and if this latitude continues after the elections.

Freedom of association

Immediately after the June 1989 coup, the junta banned free association. Constitutional Decree No. 2 stated that "all political parties and groups are to be disbanded, and it is illegal for them to be established or to remain active." The decree also banned all trade unions and federations and confiscated their funds andproperties, and canceled all licenses issued to non-religious institutions and societies.

In 1996 the ban on political parties remains intact, although seven years have passed and the elimination of political parties appears intended to be a permanent political arrangement, not a temporary measure. The NIF justifies this by what it describes as a need to do away with sectarian political parties; in past multiparty elections, the largest vote-getters were parties based on Sufi Muslim religious sects whose followers voted for their religious leaders - usually men who inherited their positions. These parties were the Umma (Ansar sect) and the Democratic Unionist Party (Khatmiyya sect). The ban on political parties, however, extends also to nonsectarian political parties, such as the Sudan Communist Party and the Republican Brothers.

All parties are banned, with the de facto exception of the NIF. It is an open secret that the government has been run from behind the scenes by this technically "banned" political party. Elections for president and some legislative seats were held in March 1996 but no political parties were allowed to participate, and many NIF leaders were elected. NIF leader Dr. Hassan al Turabi became speaker of the National Assembly.

Other associations, such as professional groups, have been permitted to reconstitute themselves under post-1989 laws, but their independence is severely limited and their freedom restricted by the "red line." The government maintains that they are subject to their own administrative regulations but subjects professional associations and trade unions to close control: it was precisely these organizations that played a leading role in the peaceful overthrow of two Sudanese dictatorships in 1964 and 1985. Other civic associations, such as trade unions and student unions, have been taken over by NIF supporters through tactics including the detentions of rival leaders, dirty tricks and violence.

A neighborhood network of popular committees, created by the current government, provides a means to control residential areas where demonstrations also played a political role in toppling past governments. These committees, too, cannot go beyond the "red line" to defend the interests of residents against the government - such as opposing government demolitions of its members' homes.

Freedom of assembly

The government of Sudan has stated that freedom of assembly is fully guaranteed by law. In fact, the law is administered to permit only government-sponsored or pro-government assemblies and demonstrations. Anti-government assemblies, both indoors and outdoors, remain illegal because the government will not grant permits to its opponents and violently represses their demonstrations, soopponents rarely seek such permits. Their assemblies, or indoor meetings, take place clandestinely, if they are held at all, to prevent Sudan Security from observing and arresting the participants. This repression of the right of peaceable assembly has been going on for almost seven years; citizens know where the "red line" is, and continue to cross it at their peril.

The outer limits of the right of assembly have been explored by the relatives of twenty-eight army officers who were summarily executed for an alleged coup attempt in 1990. They demonstrate publicly once a year on or near the anniversary of the executions. Sudan Security has used excessive force illegally to break up their demonstrations, which have been peaceful. In 1995 a demonstration in a Khartoum street quickly disbanded when Sudan Security arrived, but the authorities proceeded to beat and detain six women. In 1996 Sudan Security refrained from physically attacking the demonstrators. However, it continued its harassment and intimidation campaign to prevent the relatives from exercising their rights by approaching them before the day of the demonstration and asking them to sign statements agreeing not to demonstrate. The government still does not accept their right to peaceably demonstrate, and in 1996 only grudgingly tolerated their short annual demonstration.

In late 1994 police used lethal force to break up a demonstration of squatters protesting the bulldozing of their homes in Khoder, Omdurman. The police killed about eleven shanty town residents and injured many more; some protesters reportedly threw stones at the bulldozers, but all available evidence indicates that the use of firearms was a grossly disproportionate response. After a storm of international protests, the government managed to conduct the next large demolition of squatters' homes in Angola, Omdurman, in March 1995 without the use of lethal force.

Right to movement

The right to freedom of movement inside Sudan has been severely restricted, with the southern region placed off-limits to many, including southerners living in the north whose families are in the south. Restrictions are particularly hard on southerners who were politically active during the period of multiparty government. Those citizens and foreigners working in relief or development agencies, including the U.N., are subjected to very strict limitations on movement in Juba and other southern garrison towns, and thus on the work they can do there. Movement to the Nuba Mountains is tightly controlled on the limited occasions it is permitted, making relief or development programs there out of the question, except by agencies aligned with the government's Islamization program.

Even in Khartoum there are restrictions on movement for certain categories of people, although in the past year those restrictions seem to have eased. Former political detainees - never charged with or convicted of any crime - frequently must sign a written undertaking agreeing to limitations on their residence and not to travel abroad or sometimes, even outside a designated city, without prior approval.

Since an exit visa is required for citizens and residents leaving Sudan, departure is never problem free for certain categories of people. They include former political detainees and those who intend to attend conferences abroad. Even after the issuance of an exit visa, the authorities have stopped travelers from leaving with no reason given.

Women's rights of movement and travel outside the country are subjected to discrimination in that adult women, unlike adult men, must have the permission of a male family member or guardian to travel.

Freedom of religion

Being a Muslim does not guarantee freedom of religion in Sudan's Islamic state. The two large Muslim sects, the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, from which, in the past, the two largest political parties drew their members - the Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party, both banned since 1989 - have been subjected to government attempts at control and confiscation of their mosques. Some Muslim religious groups critical of the government and the National Islamic Front - as being insufficiently religious - have been subjected to harassment.

The government took a step forward in its relations with the churches when it repealed the Missionary Society Act of 1962 in late 1994, under which foreign missionaries were expelled from Sudan in 1964. Subsequently, however, the president issued a decree the churches feared would require each Christian congregation to register separately and secure approval from a government minister to continue worshiping, while imposing other controls on their daily affairs that threatened to violate the freedom of religion. When the churches rose in protest against the decree's unfairness, the decree was not enforced.

The government's move to grant more exit visas to Christian clergy is counter-balanced by heavy-handed government tactics to restrict the movement and freedom of expression of clergy. The arrest and televised release in January 1996 of a priest who the government said was involved in "sabotage" plans in Juba marked a recent heightening of tension between the government and the Christian community. The priest and a student detained about the same time - both members of a southern tribe, the Toposa - were reportedly tortured into making false confessions in court and before the video cameras of Sudan Security.

The most serious religious rights violations, however, occurred in conjunction with the government's efforts to proselytize in prisons, the armed forces, the civil service, the universities, and other sectors of society. The PDF is the principle vehicle for carrying out this agenda. Participation in forty-five days of its religious-military training program, intended to create holy warriors to fight in a holy war in the south, is mandatory for civil servants, university students, and others. The mandatory training, infused as it is with Islamic religious fervor, creates an atmosphere of coercion on all participants to convert to Islam in violation of freedom of religion, or if they are already Muslim, to join in the government's particular interpretation of Islam.

Students' free association and expression rights and police conduct

The largest anti-government demonstrations in the six years since the army and NIF seized power started on university campuses in September 1995. Up to thirty anti-government protesters were killed and at least seventeen wounded as the demonstrations spread to the center of Khartoum and other towns. Many hundreds were beaten and detained without charges.

Crowd control does not appear to have been conducted in compliance with United Nations guidelines on the use of force and firearms by law enforcement officers. Security forces used live ammunition and tear gas on the first and second days of the demonstration to disperse the demonstrators, some of whom reportedly smashed windows and caused other damage to property. The principle that the intentional lethal use of firearms be permitted only when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life does not seem to have been followed.

The government also used NIF security forces and NIF youth militias, neither of which are lawfully established and regulated public forces, alongside police and Sudan Security forces to control and attack the student demonstrators. Where those allowed to use firearms are not part of public law enforcement bodies, but are members of ruling party militias, supervision and control of their conduct and use of force is particularly difficult to regulate and accountability for official misconduct is sidestepped.

Human Rights Watch received reports that up to 2,000 students and others were detained incommunicado without any criminal charges brought against them. Some detainees reportedly were beaten and tortured; more than three had their arms deliberately broken, according to later evidence. After local and international protests, most detainees were released after a few days, but the government reiterated its determination to try several on unspecified charges. Several prominent advocates (lawyers) were arrested at the same time and released without explanation a few days later.

Ahliya University in Omdurman became the target of a security force raid on September 23, 1995, in which agents deliberately brutalized a student who was admitted to Omdurman Hospital the same day with several broken limbs. The agents destroyed college computers and ransacked offices. Ahliya University, a private university, had refused to enforce the policy of making Arabic the language of instruction (which the Ministry of Higher Education mandated throughout Sudan), employed lecturers purged from public universities, and had a liberal attitude toward women's dress. The greatest issue of contention between Ahliya University and the government's however, was reportedly the tolerance of a student movement that the authorities considered too rebellious. In late November 1995, armed members of NIF student and other militias attacked anti-government students at Ahliya; the Student Union Activity Center was burned down and many students were injured. The government refused to intervene to halt the assault.

Abuses by the government in the war

The government's approach to the war is divisive: its aim appears to be a military victory in which the dominant Islamic and Arabic culture is imposed on militarily defeated non-Islamic and non-Arabic speaking southern and other peoples. The south is to be "brought to the light" - an expression frequently used in conversation by government officials and NIF supporters - through conversion, assimilation and abandonment of southern cultures, languages and religions. The war against the south is characterized as a Holy War (jihad). At frequent government mass rallies the head of state and other government officials address the participants as Muslims and encourage them to continue with the Holy War against the south. On the fortieth anniversary of the independence of Sudan, for example, President Lt.-Gen. al Bashir

reaffirmed that Sudan was entering a renaissance, which is an embodiment of real independence, so that Sudan could perform its Arab, Islamic and international roles. . . . [He] referred to the spirit of jihad which has engulfed the entire people of Sudan. He said that sectors of the society were currently competing with each other in the fields of jihad in defense of the faith and the homeland.5

The government refers to Muslims who die in battle against the south as holy warriors (mujahedeen) and martyrs (shu'hada), celebrating their deaths by "weddings" as promised in the Qur'an.

The army provides Islamic religious training to national service conscripts and Popular Defense Forces (PDF) militia. There is little respect for the right to maintain one's own non-Muslim religion in this environment, and the pressure to conform by adapting to Muslim religious practices is great. Civil servants, aspiring university students and others are required to join these ostensibly voluntary PDF forces for forty-five days and receive military/religious training. All students, male and female, wishing to enter any university must first have completed PDF training, and have a certificate to prove it; this requirement is in addition to national service obligations imposed on male students.

The government has manipulated differences between different southern peoples and financed several ethnic breakaway rebel factions to serve as its proxies in attacks on the main rebel group, the SPLM/A. In March 1996, Cmdr. Riek Machar, leader of the mostly Nuer Southern Sudan Independence Movement/Army (SSIM/A) forces who lead a breakaway from the SPLM/A in 1991, signed a peace agreement with the government. Joining him was Cmdr. Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, formerly of SSIM/A, a Dinka from northern Bahr El Ghazal who has terrorized his region for more than a year, looting and killing Dinka civilians and sometimes members of the SPLA, with the support of the Khartoum government. From the beginning of the war in 1983, the government has always supported militias composed of southerners disaffected with the SPLA and its commander-in-chief, John Garang. The government is responsible for the atrocities committed by the militias working with it.

As the government army has - with one exception - denied taking any combatants prisoner during the thirteen years of civil war, it appears likely that summary executions are committed in the field. The army has indiscriminately bombed civilian areas in the south, including landing strips where displaced civilians gathered to receive relief food from U.N. and other agencies. Army and government militia have committed abuses of humanitarian law such as beating and torturing prisoners, and conducting scorched earth campaigns of indiscriminate firing at villages and civilians, looting, and kidnaping women and children for use as slave or forced domestic labor. Government forces occupy garrison towns in the south surrounded by a sea of rebels.

Slavery

Slavery is even more forbidden as a topic for discussion inside government-controlled Sudan than is self-determination for the south and religiousdiscrimination. Historically, southern peoples, including the Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk, were captured in slave raids by the Turko-Egyptian empire and by northern and western Sudanese, including by the nomadic Baggara tribes of Darfur.

Slavery experienced a resurgence when the Baggara were armed with automatic weapons by the central government to attack their Dinka civilian neighbors in the mid-1980s. The Dinka are the largest of the southern peoples, and the top leadership of the SPLM/A is Dinka. Following a common but illegal counterinsurgency theory of draining the "sea" or people so the "fish" or rebels cannot swim, the tribal militias were given a free hand to raid the Dinka, killing those who resisted, looting cattle, and violently capturing women and children - war booty - to be used as slaves in unpaid domestic labor, enforced by beatings. This practice continues today. Testimony from children who escaped from slavery, and the relatives who sought the freedom of captive family members held as house servants, was collected by Human Rights Watch during its 1995 visit to Sudan. See Children of Sudan: Slaves, Street Children and Child Soldiers (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1995).

The government has been under investigation by several U.N. bodies and mechanisms with regard to the allegation of condoning slavery and forced labor for several years, notably the International Labor Organization, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, and other mechanisms of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

The government in response to a U.N. report has claimed that, with regard to slavery, "the element of intention is decisive." In the Sudan, it maintains, tribal fights normally result in captives and prisoners of war on both sides of the conflict, but there is no intention to take slaves. Testimonies of scores of escaped slaves taken over several years by different organizations and journalists rebut the premise that there is no intention to take slaves. Captured women and children are transported hundreds of kilometers from the victims' homes to the homes of the attackers, forced through physical punishment to work for no pay, and tracked down when they try to escape.

The government has taken the inexcusable attitude that slavery must be "proven" to it, instead of living up to its obligations under international human rights law to seriously investigate the grave and frequently well-documented reports on this practice, and protect its citizens from this abuse.

Abuses by the rebels in the civil war

The rebel forces also have a history of human rights and humanitarian law abuses including holding fellow rebels prisoner in prolonged arbitrary detention, confiscating food from civilians, looting, and summary executions. Indiscriminatefighting between and among rebel factions has led to numerous civilian casualties and enormous displacement of the population.

The highest number of civilian casualties caused by fighting between rebel factions in 1994 was an attack on Akot in the Lakes region of Bahr El Ghazal, in Dinka territory, in October 1994, where 106 bodies were counted, mostly civilians: forty-eight women and children and fifty-eight men (twenty of the dead were identified as SPLA soldiers). Thousands of cattle were stolen by the raiders. The attacks were by a Nuer militia believed to be backed by the government of Sudan, and the SSIM/A.

Despite the "permanent" cease-fire agreed in April 1995 between the SPLM/A and the SSIM/A, and probably in retaliation for the attack on Akot and to regain stolen cattle, forces believed to be under SPLA command from the Akot area raided Ganyliel in July 1995, killing 210 people, mostly civilians (thirty men, fifty-three women, and 127 children), and destroyed thirty-five villages. This was the highest number of civilian casualties from the fighting between rebel factions in 1995. Over 3,500 head of cattle were looted. Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) (Southern Sector), the United Nations-coordinated disaster relief program, undertook an investigation and the SPLA promised to investigate and report on the incident. No SPLA report was ever produced but some of the stolen property was returned.

Looting of civilians and of U.N. and non-government (NGO) relief supplies by the parties has continued, often on a large scale. When the OLS evacuated relief staff from Nasir on February 10, 1996, their equipment and property were extensively looted, including boats and generators, almost certainly by SSIA forces. In 1995 almost forty relief personnel were taken hostage in three separate incidents, according to the OLS.

The SPLA admits it has taken government soldiers and officers and Popular Defense Forces militia members prisoner in combat. It permitted a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to 229 such prisoners in January 1996, and 102 prisoners in April 1996; the SPLA acknowledged holding about 600 persons in detention. To date, however, it has not permitted the ICRC to visit rebels accused by the SPLA of "treason" or other crimes.

Equal treatment for the displaced and squatters

The rights of the poor to due process before their homes are demolished is nonexistent. Since 1990, access to the courts or to any tribunal to adjudicate property claims regarding land registered in the name of the state has been flatly denied by government decree. This gave the government a free hand to deal with the squatters and displaced persons who occupied state and unregistered land -since under the same decree, all unregistered land was to be considered to be registered or held in the name of the state. Hundreds of thousands of squatters and displaced persons have been denied due process as part of a systematic government campaign of "relocation" in high gear since 1992 in Khartoum. Their homes are bulldozed, and they are forcibly relocated to unprepared sites far from Khartoum and any employment possibilities. In 1994, eleven persons were shot dead when squatters and displaced persons resisted home destruction and forcible relocation in Omdurman.

The displaced or squatters who arrived in Khartoum after 1990, almost all southerners and Nubas, are denied all relocation and property rights when they are forcibly evicted and their homes in "unauthorized settlements" destroyed. They are forced to live in sites in which they have no right of tenure and no guarantee they will not be displaced again.

Recommendations to the government of Sudan:

The right to life and to physical integrity

* Institute a high level program to halt torture, including official directives condemning its use, routine criminal investigations to be instituted into reports of torture, the prosecution of torturers, the protection of those making complaints of torture, and legislation to prohibit the use of confessions or other evidence obtained through torture in criminal proceedings.

* Introduce safeguards against torture in law and in administrative procedures including requirements that all detainees be brought promptly before a judicial authority, that prompt and regular access to families, defense counsel and a doctor of one's choice be assured, and that incommunicado detention outside the supervision of the courts never be tolerated.

* Safeguards should include legislation to prohibit the holding of detainees anywhere that has not been publicly acknowledged as a place of detention and to provide accurate and up to date central records of all detentions, the latter to be available for consultation by the families and lawyers of detainees.

* The same authorities should not be responsible both for the interrogations of detainees and for the custodial care of these detainees, in order to increase the protection of detainees by introducing a further element of supervision; the responsibility of Sudan Security both for the maintenance of detention centers and for interrogations should be ended.

* Detention facilities under the sole supervision of Sudan Security or other security agencies, notably the unacknowledged centers known as "ghost houses," should be closed, and no further detention facilities should be established that are not publicly acknowledged and regulated in accord with the law. Unrestricted access to the former "ghost houses" should be allowed for members of the human rights community, the press and the diplomatic corps to verify their closure.

* The section of Kober Prison built especially for security detainees should be removed from the jurisdiction of Sudan Security and restored to the jurisdiction of the General Administration of Prisons.

* Halt the execution of punishments that are inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading, in particular the death penalty in any form, whether prescribed through some form of legal process law or through extrajudicial executions, with a view towards the effective abolition of these punishments in law and practice.

* In the context of measures to eliminate cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, halt the use of shackling within the prison system except in situations permitted under international standards, such as to prevent escape during transfer from one facility to another.

* Fully disclose the record of military trial proceedings against the twenty-eight officers tried and executed in April 1990 for alleged involvement in a coup attempt; disclose to their families the locations of their graves and permit the families to rebury these officers. If there were others tried and executed in connection with the same attempted coup, publicly disclose their names, ranks and the trial records, and permit their families to rebury them.

* Establish an independent commission of inquiry, composed of representative experts drawn from civil society, to investigate evidence of torture, summary executions, and forcible "disappearances" with full powers to receive official information, its report to be made public. The scope of this enquiry should include the summary executions of twenty-eight army officers and possibly others with them in April 1990, the scores of executions and "disappearances" reported in Juba in 1992, as well as well-documented cases of torture such as that of Brig. al Rayah and the accused in the so-called "Explosives Case." The procedures of such an enquiry should include provisions to protect the safety of witnesses.

* Discontinue pardons or amnesties for military or security persons convicted of grave abuses of civilians or captured combatants.

The right to a fair trial and not to be arbitrarily detained

* Abolish detention solely for the exercise of freedom of expression, association and assembly as protected in international human rights law.

* Halt prolonged detention without charge in preventive detention and other forms of administrative detention; repeal or amend the National Security Act of 1995 so that warrantless arbitrary detention without charge or trial and prolonged incommunicado detention without judicial review is no longer tolerated.

* All detainees, including those now held under detention provisions in the National Security Act, should either be promptly charged or released; prisoners sentenced in unfair trials should be given the opportunity to appeal their sentences in proceedings meeting international standards for a fair trial or released.

* Discontinue trials of civilians in military courts.

* Guarantee all defendants a fair and public trial within a reasonable time, in accord with international fair trial standards, including the right to defense counsel, access to the evidence to be used against them, the right to an appeal, and sufficient time to fully exercise these rights.

Freedom of expression, opinion and association

* Lift the prohibition on political parties and permit their members to engage in free speech, free association and free assembly without harassment.

* Lift restrictions on the independence of trade unions, professional associations, ethnic. religious and other associations.

* Permit independent human rights monitors and organizations to function without interference.

* Lift arbitrary restrictions on the press and revoke the 1993 Press and Printed Materials Law; permit newspapers publishing before June 30, 1989, to reopen, including but not limited to those newspapers formerly affiliated with political parties.

* Allow free expression of independent opinion in the media, including such media as leaflets and handbills.

* Put an end to the current practice of summary closure of publications and the detention and harassment of journalists and writers for the nonviolent expression of opinions.

* Guarantee academic freedom; cease the dismissal on political grounds of academic and administrative staff in state institutions and reinstate all those who have been arbitrarily dismissed.

* Guarantee freedom of association for students in national and private universities.

Freedom of religion

* Permit adherents of all religions to worship freely and to build, purchase or rent houses of worship without obstruction. Non-Muslim congregations and churches should be permitted to carry out religious activities freely, on the same terms applying to Muslims, without discriminatory governmental interference.

* Respect the right of religious organizations to maintain charitable or humanitarian institutions, to acquire materials related to religious rights, to teach, to train leaders, and other activities; cease imposing on some religions and their activities regulations and requirements not imposed equally on all religions.

* If religious instruction continues to be offered in schools, facilitate instruction in non-Muslim religions and beliefs, so that they are available to students readily and without discrimination or coercion in their choice of religion. Respect the rights of students to receive no religious instruction if they or their families so choose.

* Convicted prisoners of all faiths should have equal access to provisions for early release offered those who take religious instruction, based on their own religions; this program now applies only to those who memorize the Qur'an (take instruction in Islam).

* Abolish criminal punishment for the offense of renouncing Islam.

* Establish the equality in law of women and of non-Muslims and punish discrimination against them.

* Protect the rights of practitioners of all religions and beliefs to equal treatment and nondiscrimination in the army, civil service, schools and other aspects of public life.

Freedom of movement

* Lift foreign travel bans established on political grounds, including those imposed through the requirement of exit visas to leave the country, and permit the movement of Sudanese to any part of their country.

* Reduce controls on travel between the north and the south; facilitate north-south travel by those current or former southern residents who wish to relocate or visit their families.

* Facilitate access to all parts of the country, particularly the Nuba Mountains and the south, for human rights monitors, human rights educators, and relief workers.

The use of force in the control of demonstrations and other public assemblies

* Train police, including the People's Police Force, in the U.N. guidelines on the use of force, and incorporate these guidelines into police regulations and training materials concerned with crowd control.

* Prevent National Islamic Front forces and other forces not established and regulated by law from taking any part in the suppression of demonstrations or other police work

* Protect those exercising their freedom of expression, association and assembly from attacks, including attacks by government supporters.

* Investigate reports of the excessive use of force in the context of government programs to clear communities of squatters and the displaced, in the government response to student demonstrations in September 1995, and in the raids on the Omdurman Ahliya University campus in September and November 1995, and make the findings public.

* Disband and disarm National Islamic Front militias and security forces and other such quasi-governmental forces that are not formally established and regulated by law and open to public scrutiny and accountability before the law.

Human rights and the internally displaced

* Halt the destruction of homes of the internally displaced and squatters in Khartoum and other urban areas until the right to judicial review and appeal, suspended by the 1990 Amendment to the Civil Transactions Act, is restored; award compensation without discrimination on account of social origin, race, religion, or other status.

* Halt the forced relocation of internally displaced and squatters from the Khartoum area to areas far distant from urban centers and work opportunities.

* Halt the arbitrary relocation of persons living in rural areas from their villages under the pretext of military operations , and permit those who have been relocated in the past to return to their homes.

* Allow freedom of movement and residence, so that displaced people and squatters can return to their former homes if they wish.

* Compensate those who have lost homes and possessions in past relocations.

National service and the Popular Defense Forces (PDF)

· End conscription of those under the age of eighteen into the armed forces and the nominally voluntary PDF militia; prevent the participation in hostilities of those aged under eighteen. Conscription should be enforced only through procedures established in law, and without resort to the use of force in violation of international standards.

* Introduce legislation and procedures to provide alternative civilian service for those who object to national service in the military on conscientious grounds.

* Eliminate measures to compel non-Muslims performing national service or undergoing PDF training and service to take part in Islamic education programs and worship.

* Eliminate the requirement that any person serve in the Popular Defense Forces as a condition of government employment, university matriculation or similar activities unless and until its training programs are modified to respect the right of all participants freely to exercise their own religion.

* PDF training programs offering prisoners who choose to participate early release should be modified to allow participation by non-Muslims without prejudice to their rights not to be compelled to change their religion.

* Establish full accountability for abuses committed by the Popular Defense Forces and associated tribal militias, through transparent disciplinary and criminal procedures.

Stopping slavery and related practices

* Establish urgently a program to put an end to the capture and exploitation of children and other civilians during army and militia raids and their confinement in slavery-like conditions, to include public reporting of the measures taken.

* As an urgent priority, identify and release those held in captivity by members of tribal militias (including militias of the Baggara), Popular Defense Forces, military, and others; investigate all reports of the kidnaping and/or enslavement of civilians, especially children, with a view to releasing all those held against their will and/or forced to work without compensation, and prosecuting those in any way responsible for their capture or captivity or who benefited from their forced labor.

* Investigate all reports of children and adults held against their will as servants or laborers, paid or unpaid, and all reports of their physical or sexual abuse, and prosecute those found responsible;

* Establish, in consultation with international agencies with experience in locating missing persons, a central agency responsible for assisting family members to locate their missing relatives, and assure funding necessary for its operations, including publicity and full cooperation with community representatives seeking to trace community members taken in army and militia raids.

* As part of a comprehensive program to eliminate slavery and slavery-like practices, enforce fully Sudanese law punishing child abuse, kidnaping, hostage-taking, and forced or child labor, with regular, public reports on relevant criminal investigations, prosecutions and convictions. Investigate and prosecute officials and police officers who fail to enforce criminal laws in this regard.

* Ensure that the armed forces, security agencies and militia issue and enforce orders to halt the capture of children and other civilians who are not detained for recognizable criminal offenses, their exploitation and their transfer within and from the war zones.

* Institute procedures to prevent military personnel, militia and others under military jurisdiction from taking unrelated persons with them from war zones or garrison towns, and especially prevent such persons from using government transport to move unrelated persons.

* Prevent transportation by adults of unrelated children from state to state without appropriate authorization. Where the adult is of a different ethnic background from the child, the circumstances of such transport should be closely scrutinized.

* Introduce legislation to provide increased safeguards against slavery, including measures outlawing the unpaid the employment of non-family members of whatever age, and ratifying the International Labor Organization (ILO) Minimum Age Convention of 1973 (No. 138).

* Cooperate fully with the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, the ILO, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the U.N. Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights' Special Rapporteur on Sudan in their investigations of reported slavery-like abuses.

* Request international cooperation, particularly technical assistance and advice, to pay urgent and due regard to reports of slavery and forced labor.

The rights of children

* Continue with the family reunification program for street children held in government camps.

* Halt the random capture of children from the streets and their transfer to closed camps without notification of their families. Children presently in the camps should be reunified with their families where possible, while care for homeless children and those whose families cannot be traced should be provided through programs which respect freedom of religion.

* Investigate the allegations of ill-treatment in the government's closed camps for street children and punish those responsible.

* In any detention of street children believed to be at risk, a first priority should be to establish contact with the child's family or guardian; prolonged custodial care of street children should be subject to judicial supervision, while due process guarantees should be present in any case in which children are brought into the criminal justice system. Alternatives to incarceration or confinement in closed custodial establishments should be provided where feasible.

* Ratify the African Convention on the Rights of the Child and introduce legislation to implement its provisions for the protection of children.

Human rights protection and the war in the south

* Respect international humanitarian law and human rights law, prohibiting the targeting of civilian and civilian objects in military operations, indiscriminate attacks, looting and unnecessary destruction of civilian property.

* Accord members of the SPLA or other rebel groups who are captured or otherwise hors de combat humane treatment; cease government secrecy concerning the capture and fate of suspected combatants.

* Investigate abuses committed by members of the Sudan Armed Forces, security services, militias and associated former rebel groups working with them. Bring to trial those held responsible for such abuses.

* Compensate those whose property has been looted or deliberately destroyed in violation of international standards during military or other government operations.

* Affirm the right of non-combatants in war-affected areas to receive food, medicine, and other relief, and cease actions that might prejudice their receipt of such relief. The U.N. Operation Lifeline Sudan, the ICRC and other relief programs should be allowed to proceed in accordance withhumanitarian need, without hindrance. Provide safe land, river and air access for the provision of humanitarian aid.

· Permit the ICRC to visit persons detained in connection with the conflict according to its specific criteria.

Recommendations to the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army and other armed rebel groups:

* Respect international humanitarian and human rights law, particularly the prohibitions on targeting civilians, indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and destruction or looting of civilian property.

* Refrain from involuntarily recruiting anyone.

* Refrain from using children under the age of eighteen as combatants and prevent them from participating in hostilities.

* Facilitate voluntary family reunification.

* Permit the ICRC to visit persons detained in connection with the conflict according to its specific criteria.

* Cease taking hostages.

* Provide safe land, river and air access for the provision of humanitarian aid.

* Cooperate with human rights monitors and educators, and facilitate their access to all parts of the country.

* Affirm the right of noncombatants in war-affected areas to receive food, medicine, and other relief, and not undertake any action that might prejudice their receipt of such relief. In particular, cease looting relief barges and the equipment of relief agencies.

· Refrain from taking food or non-food items, directly or indirectly, from civilians, particularly those at or below the subsistence level; any supplies taken by military personnel should be paid for.

* Abolish political detention, torture, ill-treatment and the death penalty in any form.

* Launch public investigations and permit investigations by others into allegations of human rights abuses committed by each rebel force's own members, and take disciplinary action against those responsible for such abuses, including but not limited to the July 1995 attack on Ganyliel, the October 1994 attack on Akot, the disappearance of Dr. Karlo Madut in 1994, the killing of Martin Majieur in 1993, and the killings of three relief workers and one journalist in 1992.

* Cooperate with international agencies willing to provide instruction in humanitarian law to combatants.

Recommendations to the United Nations Security Council:

* Institute an arms embargo on the parties to the conflict in Sudan, with special attention to bombs and aircraft used to deliver them.

Recommendations to U.N. Commission on Human Rights and High Commissioner for Human Rights:

* Assure that the proposals of the special rapporteur on human rights in Sudan for establishing three U.N. human rights monitors to be based in Eritrea, Kenya and Uganda are accepted by all necessary parties and appropriately funded, and that their duties include observation, investigation, bringing to the attention of the responsible authorities, and making public violations of humanitarian and human rights laws by all parties. The monitors should have access to all parts of Sudan.

* Establish a civilian-directed and staffed program of human rights education for all regions of Sudan. This program should be a supplement to, not a substitute for, the human rights monitors.

* Persuade the government to continue and expand upon its "open-door" policy in the field of human rights.

* Recommend to the government that it permit the extension of OLS emergency relief operations to all areas where war-affected civilians live in the Nuba Mountains and other disputed areas of the country.

Recommendations to UNICEF, ILO, U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and other concerned U.N. bodies, mechanisms and agencies:

· conduct voluntary family reunification; where small groups of minors are separated from their larger tribe, efforts should be made to reunite them in the safest location, even if that means reuniting them outside of Sudan or from one country of refuge to another. This task should receive the cooperation of all U.N. and NGO agencies.

* UNICEF and the ILO should establish and fund programs to effectively promote the adoption of national legislation and implementing programs to ban child labor, slavery, and slavery-like practices.

* UNICEF, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights' special rapporteur on Sudan, and the ILO monitor the application of the slavery and forced labor conventions to Sudan, and thatall send fact-finding missions to investigate the reported abuses and the mechanisms the government is employing to confront the problem.

* UNICEF, the ILO, and the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery should work with the government of Sudan to establish government mechanisms to effectively assist families in the search for kidnaped or missing family members.

Recommendations to the African Commission on Human and People's Rights

* Conduct, as soon as possible, a fact-finding mission to Sudan with regard to its emergency situation and serious violations of human and people's rights, and make a public written report to the session of the African Commission to be held in October 1996, on the following topics: summary executions; torture and ill-treatment; arbitrary arrests and fundamental fairness at trial; slavery and slave-like practices; freedom of religion, expression, assembly, association, and movement; treatment of displaced persons and squatters in Khartoum; and observance of human rights in the war in southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and eastern Sudan.

Recommendations to the "Friends of IGAAD" (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway), the European Union, and other concerned governments and bodies

* Support an arms embargo on all parties to the conflict, including by urging major exporters China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, South Africa, and others, to stop arms sales or transfers to Sudan. Similarly urge countries or others supplying arms to the SPLA and other armed rebel groups to cease their arms sales or transfers. Establish a multilateral monitoring mechanism for the implementation of an arms embargo. Members of the European Union should enforce the E.U. arms embargo of Sudan established as the common position of the European Union by council decision of March 16, 1994.

* Support the creation of a full-time U.N. human rights monitoring team, and provide financing for it.

* Support the creation of a civilian directed and staffed program of human rights education for all regions of Sudan. This program should be a supplement to, not a substitute for, the human rights monitors. The recommended U.N. human rights monitors and educational program should not be funneled through the government, the SPLA or other rebel factions or their agencies.

* Maintain pressure on the Sudan government and the SPLA and other rebel factions to permit access to relief operations.

* Use their votes in international financial institutions to freeze Sudanese requests for loans or disbursements, including from the African Development Bank, until patterns of gross human rights abuses are eliminated.

* Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zaire and other countries receiving Sudanese refugees should permit those unaccompanied boys in Sudan or in other countries to be reunited with their parents or closest surviving relatives who are refugees in their territories pursuant to their obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 10.

Recommendations to nongovernmental organizations working in Sudan

* Bring to the attention of the appropriate bodies, including the parties to the conflict, U.N. agencies, and donors, abuses committed by the parties to the conflict in possible violation of international standards of humanitarian law and human rights.

* Routinely include the human rights situation and the human rights consequences of a relief operation in field reports, country reports, and reports to the public of all the relief agencies concerned.

2

The National Security Act of 1995 provides for prolonged arbitrary detention in security cases of up to six months without judicial review. This is a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 9.1 The judicial review that takes place after six months of warrantless incommunicado detention is inadequate; an appointee of the chief justice, who takes a very passive view of these supervisory duties, is supposed to conduct this review.2 The government has misrepresented the status of this law to the U.N. It said in November 1995 that the 1992 National Security Act was in effect, and failed to disclose that it was replaced by a more restrictive 1995 act signed into law in May 1995.

The new law was quickly applied to facilitate the detention of the former prime minister and leader of the banned Umma Party and the mass detentions of suspected Umma Party leaders, all released, without charges, in August 1995. It was used again to cut off student protests against the government in September 1995 in the streets of Khartoum. Hundreds were detained, sometimes by NIF party security and militias; in 1996, the act was used to detain persons suspected of connections with the nascent armed opposition movement based in Eritrea, and representatives of civil society.

Sudan is in the throes of an internal armed conflict in the south and other areas, but the absence of combatants captured by the army in the thirteen years of war raises the troubling possibility that they might have been killed as a matter of government policy. The burden of explaining this anomalous situation lies heavily on the government.

THE APPLICABLE LAW

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 9, states simply that "No one shall be subject to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile." Article 9 of theICCPR is designed to further protect against arbitrary arrest and detention. It provides:

1. Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedures as are established by law.

2. Anyone who is arrested shall be informed, at the time of arrest, of the reasons for his arrest and shall be promptly informed of any charges against him.

3. Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release. It shall not be the general rule that persons awaiting trial shall be detained in custody, but release may be subject to guarantees to appear for trial, at any other stage of the judicial proceedings, and, should occasion arise, for execution of the judgement.

4. Anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful.

5. Anyone who has been victim of unlawful arrest or detention shall have an enforceable right to compensation.

The African Charter provides similar protection against arbitrary arrest.3

The purpose of ICCPR Article 9 (1) is to require states to spell out in legislation the grounds on which an individual may be deprived of his liberty and the procedures to be used. This is to make clear that "[n]ot every policeman (orother state functionary) is entitled to decide at his discretion, and on his own responsibility, who can be arrested, why and how."4

Even where the government has complied with its own laws, an arrest may still be regarded as arbitrary. An "arbitrary" arrest is not limited to an "illegal" arrest. "Arbitrary" also means "unjust."

Arbitrary arrest or detention implied an arrest or detention which was incompatible with the principles of justice or with the dignity of the human person irrespective of whether it had been carried out in conformity with the law.5

Other commentators have emphasized that the purpose of the ICCPR's prohibition on arbitrary arrest is to protect individuals from despotic legislation and to establish that deprivations of liberty as occurred under the Nazi regime are not consistent with human rights merely because they were enacted into national law.6

"Political" detainees are generally those held in preventive (or administrative) detention in Sudan. They are rarely charged with any crime or brought before a court by the authorities. Article 9 (4) of the ICCPR provides that such detainees have the right to judicial supervision of the lawfulness of their arrest. It states that anyone "deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful."

The U.N. Human Rights Committee, created under Article 28 of the ICCPR, has found that the purpose of Article 9 (4) of the ICCPR is to ensure that it is a court that reviews detention, not merely any authority regulated by law, and that the reviewing authority must possess a degree of objectivity and independence to exercise adequate control over detention. It held that a person detained by orderof an administrative body or authority has the right to have that decision reviewed in a court of law.7

Significantly, Article 9 (4) gives the detainee the right to go to court for a decision "without delay." Even during states of emergency, a remedy like habeas corpus must be available.8 Thus the government may not erect barriers to a prompt judicial decision on the lawfulness of the reasons for detention. "Judicial" means providing the fundamental guarantees of judicial procedures, including an "opportunity to be heard either in person, or where necessary, through some form of representation."9

To exercise this right to a hearing under Article 9 (4), the detainee must have notice of the reasons for the detention and access to legal counsel. The right to counsel, recognized in Article 14 (3) of the ICCPR and in the U.N. Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers,10 is necessary to make the other rights in Article 9 of the ICCPR effective. The rights to a hearing and to acknowledgment of the detention are also essential to prevent forcible "disappearance."11

In order to prevent torture, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, Or Degrading Treatment or Punishment provides in Article 10:

1. Each State Party shall ensure that education and information regarding the prohibition against torture are fully included in the training of law enforcement personnel, civil or military, medical personnel, public officials, and other persons who may be involved in the custody, interrogation or treatment of any individual subjected to any form of arrest, detention or imprisonment.12

Where there are complaints of torture, the Convention against Torture requires that the competent authorities promptly investigate.13 In order to have safeguards against his or her rights not to be tortured, the detainee must have access to these authorities.14 This obligation may not be suspended in times of emergency.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1995

The National Security Act of 1995, as amended by the Transitional National Assembly (TNA),15 on its face violates the prohibition on arbitrary arrest and detention of Article 9 of the ICCPR. The act does not permit prompt review by a judicial authority of the reasons for detention. Instead, it makes judicial review of preventive detention impossible before six months of incommunicado detention have elapsed, and erects a bar to proceedings against any official responsible for this and other human rights violations. It also violates international law in that it does not provide for any effective supervision of security detention, particularly in unacknowledged places of detention, known as "ghost houses." It permits a situation in which torture and disappearance may occur unchecked.

This National Security Act of 1995 is labeled "Top Secret" and government officials, when asked for a copy, claimed they did not have one. Nevertheless, Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of the act and its amendment through unofficial channels in Sudan. For unknown reasons, the government of Sudan, in its statement submitted to the U.N. in response to the interim November 1995 human rights report by the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, refers not to the 1995 National Security Act but to the act of 1990, as amended in 1991 and 1992.16 To the best knowledge of Human Rights Watch, the National Security Act of 1990 and its amendments were abrogated by the provisional National Security Act order of November 1994.

The National Security Act in effect at the time of our May-June 1995 visit to Sudan, and still in effect as of the date of this report, was the act of 1995, as promulgated by the president in November 1994, amended by the TNA in its thirty-fifth session on April 11, 1995, and signed by President al Bashir and TNA Speaker Khalifa on May 2, 1995. Indeed, General Administrator of Prisons Maj.-Gen. al Shaikh al Rayah referred to the National Security Act of 1995 in a statement published by the official news agency during a release of security detainees on August 26, 1995.17 We analyze the provisions of the 1995 act because we conclude that the prior acts are not in effect, despite the government's representation to the U.N.

The 1995 act divides up the security apparatus into internal and external security sections.18 According to a list of detainees given by the government to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) on May 3, 1995, persons then detained pursuant to the National Security Act were suspected or accused of offenses in the following security categories: economic security (iqtisadi), state security (wilayat), security of the apparatus (amn al jihaz),19 African countries (al Ifrikiyeh), Arab countries (al Arabiyeh), the south (al janoub),20 operations (al amaliyat),21 and central administration (al idarah al markazia).22 This suggests that security's internal and external divisions include these departments.

There are two provisions pursuant to which persons may be detained without a court order under the National Security Act of 1995. One is Article 37 (1), permitting the National Security Council to authorize "preventive detention" to "preserve public peace" for a period of three months, renewable for anotherthree months. This six-month period is renewable only with the consent of a "competent judge."23

Art. 37. Preventive detention and judicial supervision.

1. The Council may order the preventive detention of any person to preserve public peace for a period of three months, renewable for another three months.

2. Renewal of detention is not permitted after the expiration of the period stated in section (1) without the approval of the competent judge.24

Sudan Security thus may avoid judicial review for six months by simple order of the National Security Council, a body composed of the president and other members of the executive branch appointed by him, and the speaker of the assembly, a position held since March 1996 by Dr. Hassan al Turabi.25 It is not a court of law, which is the sole authority that may review the detention decision. This violates Article 9 of the ICCPR's requirement of judicial supervision "without delay" of the reasons for administrative detention. Nor is the requirement of notice and a hearing met.

Article 36 of the National Security Act of 1995, the second provision for detention without court order, permits the director of security to extend the period of detention from seventy-two hours26 to one month, and requires the director to explain the reasons for an extension beyond the first seventy-two hours.

Article 36 (1) states that each member shall have the following powers:

B. With the exception of cases where the accused is caught in the act or in emergency situations, to arrest or detain any person for a period of seventy-two hours for purposes of interrogation and investigation, provided that the director [of the combined entity of security] may issue an order to extend the period of interrogation and investigation for a period not exceeding one month, explaining the reasons for such an extension.27

Although the act says the director must explain his reasons, it does not say to whom the explanation is to be given. Even if it were to be given to the detainee, the period of one month in the act between detention and notice of reasons for detention is also too long a delay under the ICCPR. Nor does the director of security qualify as a "court" under Article 9 (4) of the ICCPR. In any event it is impossible to establish who acts when because none of these proceedings are public nor does the detainee have any notice of them, if indeed they are held.

The only possibilities for legal review are by a designated justice of the Supreme Court after the statutory period of six months has elapsed under Article 37, or under the mandate apparently given to this appointee of the chief justice of the Supreme Court in Article 3 of the National Security Act of 1995, to "supervise preventive custody and inspect detention facilities."

While Article 37 provides for judicial review of the preventive detention, it does not say who has standing to bring a complaint. Most attorneys interviewed agree that the detainee does not have standing to bring a petition for his release. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the articles of the 1991 National Security Act giving the detainee the right to petition the court (or the attorney general28) were deleted from the 1995 act. When asked specifically by Human Rights Watch whether a detainee or his advocate could bring suit if he were in security custody, the chief justice and deputy chief justice of the Supreme Court -the supervising justice appointed under the act - avoided the question with a rhetorical shrug, "Why can't someone bring a suit to court?" and claimed lack of knowledge of the recently enacted National Security Act.29

The public officials responsible for the detention are immune from suit. Article 38 of the National Security Act of 1995 bars all civil and criminal proceedings against security members, except for those not related to their work. Criminal acts related to the work of the security agent are not punishable in any civil or criminal proceeding.

Article 38: Members and collaborators shall enjoy the following privileges:

(b) Without prejudice to the provisions of this law and without prejudice to any right of compensation from the state, it shall not be permissible to take any civil or criminal proceedings against the member except after the approval of the director who shall give such approval whenever it becomes evident that the issue is not related to the official work of the member.30

Nor will any court take jurisdiction of such a case. The National Security Act has achieved its deterrent intent. No attorney will petition a court for relief if he knows beforehand that his client has no standing, that the only court with jurisdiction is indifferent to security detainees, and that the relevant public officials are immune from suit.31

THE REALITY

Security detainees released in 1995 uniformly relate that they were not informed of the reasons for detention and had no right to counsel. Those detained longer than six months had no judicial review or remedy. One security detainee, whose case is described below, was told that he would not be released in the general amnesty of August 1995 because there was (ostensibly) no paperwork done on his case - despite the fact that he was detained on January 29, 1995, and his detention already exceeded the six-month limit.

Detainees released in late 1995 said that security officers led them to believe that the law applicable to preventive detention included a one hundred-day limit - less than the statutory maximum of six months, but still too long to meet due process requirements.

Security detainees were told that any agent of "officer" rank was empowered to extend the initial seventy-two hour detention period to a total of ten days. A "department" director may add one month to the ten days, for a total of forty days. The director of security may extend that period by two additional months, one month at a time. These limits do not appear in the 1995 National Security Act and seem to have been self-imposed by security.

Accordingly, based on what their captors told them, detainees expected to be released one hundred days from the date of arrest, and this timetable seems to have been followed in many cases, although not all. Some detainees spent up to two additional weeks in detention, awaiting the completion of formalities and paper work. Furthermore, since some detainees were told they were not officially entered in the records at the beginning of their detention, their day count could start whenever the officer in charge chose. As long as the detainee is not "registered," or registration is not acknowledged, security may maintain total deniability should it decide to disappear or kill the detainee.

The detainees might be held all or part of the time in "ghost houses," which are unofficial Sudan Security detention places, in security offices, or in military custody on a base or in a military intelligence facility. Detainees usually are moved several times before they are released. It appears in early 1996 that Khartoum security detainees are kept for fewer days in the ghost houses. Most are sent to the security section in Kober Prison after that.

THE ROLE OF THE SUPREME COURT

While in theory there is judicial review of preventive detention under Article 3 which outlines the supervisory duty of the Supreme Court over preventivecustody, in reality this review does not function. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, whose duty it is under this statute to appoint a justice of the Supreme Court to supervise preventive custody, said he was unaware of the terms of this act in June 1995, six months after it was issued by the president and one month after it was amended by the TNA and passed into law. He protested that it was not the duty of the Supreme Court to monitor those in security detention and free those who had been in detention longer than the maximum statutory periods, absent a petition to the Supreme Court.32

He is wrong. Under Article 3 of the act, it is the duty of the designated justice of the Supreme Court to "supervise" preventive custody. This means the Supreme Court must take an active role, not merely wait passively for someone to bring a case to its attention. The judiciary also has an obligation to supervise preventive detention pursuant to the ICCPR, Article 9 (4), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Article 11,33 and the U.N. Declaration on Forced Disappearances, Article 9 (1).34

It appears that the Supreme Court has never taken any serious action with regard to an illegally prolonged preventive detention under the prior version of the National Security Act. The deputy chief justice said in June 1995 that, in the ten months since he had been appointed under the prior act to receive complaints of detentions, he had received a petition from only one attorney. He said he had then inquired of the situation at Sudan Security, and the detainee was freed before security replied.35 We understand several weeks elapsed between the judicial inquiry and security's release of the detainee. The deputy chief justice took no affirmative steps to prevent prolonged security detentions, nor did he think he had any obligation to do so. In a later case, Hasan Ahmad Osman was detained by security on June 12, 1995. His family appealed to Deputy Chief Justice Abu Geseesa and the detainee was released in January 1996, more than six months after detention.

Past public statements by spokespersons for the judiciary indicate that the judicial blind eye currently turned to security detainees' legal rights is not a new phenomenon. In August 1992 Supreme Court Judge Abdel Rahman Sherfi, the official spokesman of the judiciary, when asked about political detainees held by security, said that the judiciary carried out inspection visits to ensure that the rights of political prisoners were respected. He denied the existence of unacknowledged detention centers where detainees were tortured and carefully confined his remarks to the situation of convicted political prisoners held in official prisons under the jurisdiction of the General Administration of the Police of Prisons and Reformation of the Ministry of Interior.36

A follow-up question on whether the judiciary had received any complaints about torture in the first year of this government (1989-90) elicited this answer: "We don't deny the probability of some individual cases [of torture in detention], circulated by some people, but no real complaints about torture in prisons reached us. Even if such cases existed, they wouldn't go beyond being isolated or unfamiliar cases with no relevance."37 This assertion is not borne out by the facts chronicled in many human rights reports on the practice of torture during those years.

In the belief that attempting to use a feckless judicial system to seek a detainee's release would be beating a dead horse, detainees and their families fall back on traditional ways of approaching officials to ask for their help - through family, personal and regional ties. They make the rounds from the attorney general's office to the ministry of the presidency to the TNA and its human rightscommittee to those reputed to hold power in the NIF, seeking to locate someone with the power to act on their behalf. All these informal avenues of redress depend on the mercy - or whim - of the powerful, not upon legal rights. Those with no strong family influence or contacts in powerful circles risk being neglected and spending comparatively longer periods in detention. Southerners and the poor are the primary victims of this arbitrary system of petition, since they do not have powerful contacts.

The deputy chair of the TNA and chair of its human rights committee, Angelo Beda, regularly receives petitions from relatives of those held in preventive detention. This committee writes letters of inquiry to Sudan Security, and in some cases, Beda says, is successful in winning the release of the detainee. He provided copies of his correspondence to Human Rights Watch, which showed that inquiries were in fact made on behalf of several security detainees.38 These formal and informal efforts made on behalf of detainees are worthwhile, but they provide only the slimmest thread of restraint on security, and are no substitute for a real judicial remedy such as a habeas corpus procedure.

TREND TOWARD RESTRICTION OF RIGHTS

In our meeting with the chair of the TNA Human Rights Committee, we were told that the TNA's 1995 amendments to the National Security Act improved the proposed 1994 act by diminishing the amount of time a person could be held in preventive detention before being brought before a judge. That was not born out by a reading of the act and its amendment, however. In Article 37 the TNA lengthened the time in preventive detention before judicial review from the proposed three months to six months.

Indeed, the National Security Act of 1995 has omitted several safeguards provided to detainees under the National Security Act of 1990, as amended,39although these were in practice rarely honored. For instance, under the 1991 National Security Act a security detainee could be held for three months without an order. At the end of that time any order of extension of the preventive detention had to be submitted, with reasons justifying the extension, to representatives of the attorney general's chamber or the judge within three days of the issuance of the extension order.40 The attorney general's representative or the judge were required to assess the reasons after "hearing from" the detainee or reading a memorandum by the detainee, and could "summarily" order the extension of the detention period, or could order the detainee's release.41

The flaw under the National Security Act of 1991 was that this procedure might be held by the representative of the attorney general, an executive, not a judicial official, although the ICCPR, Article 9, requires the hearing be held before a judicial official. The choice of the official - whether an attorney general representative or judge - conducting the hearing was up to security or other detaining authority. The 1992 amendment deleted reference to the attorney general, so that only the judge could order an extension of the detention period. The deletion of the reference to the representative of the attorney general was the only significant amendment to the act in 1992.

Even under the 1992 National Security Act, however, there was no obligation to hold a hearing at which the detainee had the right to be present, nor was there any right to counsel, nor to examine witnesses, or any other due process rights. The judge could "summarily" renew detention in three month periods, indefinitely, without any due process protections whatsoever, if he decided that "national security" called for it.42

The only approximations to due process in that act were the provisions that the detainee "shall be informed after a reasonable period of his detention of the reasons justifying his detention" (Article (A) (2), and that he had the explicit right "whenever he so wishes to raise a memorandum to the council about his detentionor his treatment." (Article 40 (A) (3)). This falls far short of the right to a hearing, however.