<<previous  |  index  |  next>>

Methodology

The information in this report is based primarily on prison visits Human Rights Watch carried out in August and October 2007 and in April 2008. The Ministry of Interior, which has authority over Jordanian prisons, quickly agreed to our request to visit five Jordanian prisons in August 2007. The Ministry invited us to visit another prison for three days in October based on our request, and the director of the Public Security Directorate, which reports to the Ministry of Interior, spontaneously agreed to a request to visit another prison in April 2008.

They also agreed to our conditions for such visits: inspection of the entire facility of each prison visited; unsupervised meetings with any prisoner of our choice willing to speak to us; and no examination of our notes. We specified that we wished to visit five of Jordan’s 10 prisons: Juwaida, Muwaqqar, Swaqa, Qafqafa and Aqaba. To our regret, immediately before the start of the prison visits in August 2007, the Ministry of Interior informed us that we could not visit Juwaida because they had scheduled it for closure, but allowed us to visit Salt (Balqa’) prison instead. Subsequently, in October 2007, the Ministry of Interior agreed to allow us three days of access to Juwaida, following a renewed written request by Human Rights Watch. In April 2008, we also had the opportunity to visit Birain prison and the construction site of Muwaqqar II prison.

Between one and three Human Rights Watch researchers carried out these visits, usually lasting around six to eight hours each. Two researchers spoke in Arabic, and an interpreter assisted a third researcher. At each facility, we first spoke with the prison director, usually accompanied by the chief of preventive security, another senior prison official, and occasionally the prison doctor. We asked the officials standard questions about prison staffing, classification of prisoners, unusual incidents and prison responses. We inspected health, dining, exercise, and solitary confinement facilities. We then chose random prison wards to meet prisoners, with the exception of Tanzimat (Islamist prisoners charged with “national security” offenses) and administrative detainees, whom we had specifically asked to see. We also asked to meet any prisoner in solitary confinement. We met prisoners accused or convicted of crimes involving traffic accidents; financial impropriety or fraud; murder and attempted murder; sexual assault; assault and theft. We interviewed both convicted and unconvicted inmates, Jordanian and foreign, between the ages of 18 and 69. Overall, we interviewed 110 prisoners, over twenty prisoners each at Juwaida, Swaqa, Qafqafa, and Muwaqqar prisons.

We took important precautions to verify the credibility of detainee testimony; attacks on the credibility of evidence obtained from detainees is a frequent government defense to allegations of abuse, and thus we focused a great deal of effort to ascertain the veracity of testimonies we received. We discussed these steps with the head of the prison service, Sharif al-‘Umari, on July 31, 2008 in Amman. Where possible, we spoke to a prisoner alone out of earshot of other prison officials . Because this was difficult, at times we gathered two or three prisoners who were all involved in a particular incident. In larger group meetings, we did not ask about physical abuse, but about food, health care, and complaint mechanisms. On at least three occasions, we spoke in a language other than Arabic to individual prisoners who recounted problems with the administration as well as with other prisoners. No conversations with prisoners took place within earshot of prison guards. However, in an apparent breach of the agreement, a Public Security Department official who accompanied Human Rights Watch to some prisons informed us in July 2008 that they had been monitoring which detainees we spoke to and had debriefed them.

Where prisoners alleged physical abuse, we asked probing questions to ascertain details of place, time, and identifying details of the abuse and the abuser. Wherever possible, we corroborated details from prisoners in different wards. In almost all cases of allegations of recent abuse, Human Rights Watch was able to witness physical signs of ill-treatment, especially raw skin at the wrists, long bruises and smaller cuts. These injuries, for example bruises on the back, were distinct from the prevalent scars resulting from prisoners’ common self-injury and in places difficult to inflict on themselves.

Human Rights Watch’s methodology is designed to detect false statements. We also spoke to former and current prison officials about their experiences in Jordanian prisons; they often, corroborated in general terms the picture of widespread torture gathered from inmates. Where police prosecutors launched investigations into torture, court documents in two instances show that witnesses separately interviewed by prosecutors and by Human Rights Watch gave similar accounts of torture.

Following meetings with prisoners, we debriefed the prison director and conveyed specific requests of prisoners to health care or visitation where we did not fear retaliation against the prisoners. To protect the prisoners to whom we spoke from retribution, we are not identifying them by name.

In October 2007, we debriefed the Ministry of Interior’s Secretary-General, Mukhaimer Abu Jamous, and the Director, and Deputy Director, Mohammed Sarhan, of its human rights office, as well as Khaled al-Majali of the prison development unit of the Royal Police Academy on our findings in prisons. At the time, we submitted a letter to the Ministry of Interior requesting statistics from the PSD prosecution and the Police Court regarding complaints, charges and verdicts against prison officials, but did not receive a response.

In April 2008, Human Rights Watch met with the director, Mazin al-Qadi, and senior leadership of the Public Security Directorate to hear about Jordan’s achievements and future plans for prison reform. We also met with the National Center for Human Rights and the European Commission’s delegation to Jordan concerning their involvement in prison reform. In July 2008, we again met with the leadership of the prison service, the Grievances and Human Rights Office, and the prison development program at the Royal Police Academy.

Human Rights Watch sent the PSD two memoranda in September 2007, one about the events at Swaqa prison on August 26, when prisoners injured themselves during our second visit there in protest at mass beatings they had endured on August 22,¹ and a second memorandum about our findings based on prisoner accounts regarding the beating to death of Firas Zaidan at Aqaba prison on May 9, 2007.² We originally kept these communications private. However, nobody in the Jordanian government responded to our memoranda, and since then, the Police Court issued unsatisfactory verdicts in both cases. The memoranda, as well as a news release regarding our investigation into the deaths on April 14, 2008 of three prisoners at Muwaqqar prison, are attached to this report.³

HRW also provided PSD director Maj.Gen. Mazen al-Qadi with a summary of our findings and concerns on September 25, 2008.

This report does not address the frequent allegations of torture in police holding stations, especially by the criminal investigation department and the counter-drugs department, or in ordinary police stations. In this report, we use the word “prison” for what Jordanians officially call Correction and Rehabilitation Centers.

---