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IV. Conditions of Detention

Children detained at police stations told us of sordid conditions. Human Rights Watch researchers saw these firsthand when we toured police lockups in Alotau, Goroka, Kokopo, and Wewak. Children are routinely detained with adults, placing boys at increased risk of rape and other abuses from other detainees. Children on remand are detained with those who have already been convicted. Many children said they had no bedding and slept on a concrete floor, and that they were not given enough food or water for drinking or washing. Toilets were clogged or overflowing, and cells smeared with excrement. The smell was overpowering. At times cells were overcrowded. Almost no children said they were given medical care, even when seriously injured by police. In two cases, police appeared to intentionally deny medical care as a form of punishment. Some children said they were not allowed to see family members or that their parents were not told where they were.

Even the government has described police lockups as “usually foul, unclean and unhealthy” to the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2002, and noted that “juveniles often spend some time there.”¹⁸⁵ Indeed, children routinely spend days or, outside of Port Moresby, weeks or even months in police lock up. This fact makes the poor conditions and detention with adults especially egregious. “Sometimes it takes weeks” before detainees go to court, the head of Wewak’s internal investigations unit admitted. “There are problems with cars and vehicles to take [the suspects]. You feel for them.”¹⁸⁶ Some children are eventually transferred to juvenile remand centers, others to prison, often to a prison’s juvenile wing. Human Rights Watch also visited three juvenile remand centers and the juvenile wings of two prisons, Bomana prison in Port Moresby and Boram prisonin Wewak.

Conditions in Wewak, Goroka, Kokopo, and Alotau

Human Rights Watch researchers visited the police lockup in Wewak, East Sepik province, on September 20, 2004. Detainees were locked in a separate building with a single locked door that opened onto a small hallway and five unlocked rooms. There were no separate cells for women or children. We saw and spoke with ten detainees as a group, out of the earshot of prisons guards; four said they were under age eighteen. The detainees were crowded into one of the four rooms because two of the three toilets had overflowed in the other rooms, covering the floors of all but one room with waste and filling the cells with a strong and offensive smell. The head of Wewak police’s internal investigation section told us that the dry cell sometimes become so overcrowded that “nobody sleeps.”¹⁸⁷ The walls were covered with graffiti that appeared to be written in feces and betel nut. There was no running water in the building, and a guard showed us a tap outside where, he said, detainees were on occasion brought for washing. The men and boys told us they received one liter of water a day and showed us the bottles stored on a sill. There was no bedding in the cells. The station commander told us: “These guys are eating one packet of biscuits in a day,” emphasizing that he had no money to give them more. “That’s why we allow relatives to bring in food.”¹⁸⁸

At Goroka police station, Eastern Highlands province, there were cells that could have been used to separate children from adults. When we visited on September 23, 2004, there were twenty-nine or thirty males in a large common area; two women were in a different room on the side.¹⁸⁹ “At the moment we have no juveniles,” the station commander told us, “From time to time we do have them.”When asked, the police station commander told us that detainees were locked in separate cells in the afternoon.¹⁹⁰ The station commander also told us, among other things, that he would like to replace the lighting in the dim cellblock. “Most of the tubes have gone out,” he said, gesturing around the cells. “We need to replace them with new ones so we can have good proper light.”¹⁹¹

Moab Y. described being detained in Goroka two years earlier when he was around fifteen years old.¹⁹² There were seven or eight people in his cell, he said, which measured about three meters by three meters. “There were some big people and some small in the jail,” he told us, indicating that some detainees were under the age of eighteen. “There was all sorts of rubbish inside. . . . Shit was lying around on the floor. There was no place to go, so we slept on the floor with the shit. There were no blankets; we slept on the ground.” They were given biscuits once a day, he said, and given water “sometimes—they didn’t give me water all the time.”¹⁹³

At Kokopo police station, East New Britain, we saw detainees being held in three separate cells. We spoke with detainees in two cells and saw detainees in the third, whom we were told were new arrivals. In the first cell we saw eight males, one of whom said he was seventeen years old and had been in the cell for eight months. In the second cell, which was larger, we counted thirty-one males, include two seventeen-year-olds and a sixteen-year-old, each of whom told us he had been there for three months. The men and boys said that they went days without going outside. Later we interviewed a man who said he was released from the lockup the previous week: “When you are kept in the cell,” he explained, “you’re not exposed to sunlight, just a small bit of light. Your skin gets yellow, you lose weight.”¹⁹⁴ In the larger cell we saw four toilets, two of which were broken, and a single tap for washing. We saw the detainees being served what they said was their only meal of the day—a plate of rice with a small amount of fish. They had no bedding or mosquito nets.

The same man who said he had been detained the previous week at the station described what it was like:

We had to drink from the tap [directly above] the toilet, and if you were really thirsty, you didn’t have any way to get water and no containers so you had to push yourself to drink from it. . . . There were some fifteen-year-olds and others—we were all together with the children. . . . There were about five boys in the cell, ages fifteen and up. I was in the small cell with these boys— cell number one. This cell is for newly arrested people suspected of robbery, rape. I was arrested as a suspect of willful damage and rape.¹⁹⁵

In contrast with the other stations we visited, the police station in Alotau, Milne Bay, was newly constructed by AusAID, but the cells were already filthy, smelled bad, and were smeared with excrement and betel nut. Three of the four cells were open to each other and we saw ten adult men detained there. Although the head of internal investigations for Alotau told us that children were detained in a cell separate from adults,¹⁹⁶ the detainees told us that a seventeen-year-old boy was being detained with them but was being questioned at the time we visited. The fourth cell was, the guard told us, used for a woman; when we saw her she was cooking for the men in a kitchen next to the cells.

We did not try to visit police lockups in Port Moresby. However, several boys who had been detained there in 2004 described what they were like. Luke J., age seventeen, said he was held at Boroko police station for one week. “I never experienced that kind of thing in my life,” he told us. “It was my first time in prison, and I was really scared. We used to sleep on the cement, where there was water. Everything was just smelling. There were nine of us in the cell.” Gesturing around us, he indicated a sleeping area roughly eight feet by ten feet. “The only food they give us is three pieces of biscuits. Every morning, three pieces of biscuits. In the evening, only rice. Nothing in the afternoon.”¹⁹⁷

Elias C., age twelve, said he had been detained in Boroko police station for four days.

I slept without food that night. Others in my cell block got food—I don’t know why they didn’t give me any. I was in a cell block on the other side. No one else was in the room with me. I was sleeping on the cement in the cell. I didn’t get any medical care for my bloody neck. The next morning they gave me tea and one biscuit and told me to stay put.¹⁹⁸

Yoshidah T., age sixteen, said he was held in a Port Moresby station overnight and then released without charge:

There was another guy in the cell, but he was bigger than me—maybe twenty or twenty-one. The police had really bashed him up. He had two black eyes and had been shot in the foot. The cell was smelly and there was blood all over it. The toilet was next to where we would sleep, so I didn’t sleep. I just stood all night. I had my shirt over my face all night because of the smell. Blood was coming out of the guy’s foot. There was blood all around on the floor. No one brought him any medicine or bandages. They did give us tea and bread—we shared a little piece of bread.¹⁹⁹

Jackson S., age seventeen,said he spent one week in Boroko police station in February 2004: “Boroko is not a good place for people to live because the toilets are not good toilets. Smells come up, and there’s water all over the place.” When asked him how big the cell was, he indicated an area that was about ten feet by ten feet. “I was in the cell by myself.” He said guards did not give him water to drink or food. “I slept on the floor. I had a sheet.”²⁰⁰

Detention of Children with Adults

As explained elsewhere in this report, the Juvenile Courts Act, protocols on the act for magistrates and police, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international standards, require police to separate children from adults in detention. In addition, under domestic and international law, children convicted of crimes should not be mixed with children who have not been convicted. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, reviewing Papua New Guinea’s implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, expressed concern “that children in detention are not always separated from adults” and recommended that the government ensure that they are.²⁰¹

In our interviews, a few very young children in Port Moresby reported being separated from adults in police lockup. Most children said they were detained with adults. We found children in every police lockup we visited, except in Goroka (where no children were detained),even where separate cells were available. We interviewed boys, the youngest age twelve, who said they had been detained with adults at Six-Mile and Boroko police stations in Port Moresby.²⁰² Other boys reported being separated from adults in Boroko and Badili police stations.²⁰³

Five of Papua New Guinea’s nineteen or twenty operational prisons have juvenile sections,²⁰⁴ but full separation between juveniles and adults in these five is not necessarily maintained. For example, in Bomana prison, in Port Moresby, the juvenile section was open at the time we visited, and children were going into the common areas to mingle freely with adults. Moreover, a chart by the Papua New Guinea Correctional Service and the National Economic and Fiscal Commission (NEFC) dated May 23, 2005, detailing the numbers of adults and juveniles convicted and on remand being held by the correctional service, lists children being held in fourteen out of twenty prisons.²⁰⁵ We also found children convicted of crimes detained with those on remand in police stations, church-run juvenile detention centers, and prisons.

Some government officials have blamed the practice of detaining children with adults on a lack of infrastructure.²⁰⁶ This is a significant problem. However, in several police stations, as already noted, separate cells were available but were not being used to separate children. For example, in Kokopo police station, we found three boys detained with adults, although there were three separate cells where detainees could be held. Instead, the cells were used to separate detainees on the basis of having newly arrived, of being accused of more serious crimes, and for other reasons. A whiteboard in the station noted “nil” for the number of juveniles and the head of the sexual offenses squad insisted that there were no children in detention at that point. On the wall at the entrance to the cells was a sign listing “Cell Procedures.” Rule number eight read: “Remandees, Fresh Cases, Juveniles, Females, and Prisoners arrested on warrant of arrest will be separated into different cells.”²⁰⁷ Papua New Guinea reported to the Committee on the Rights of the Child that where prisons have separate sections for juveniles, prison staff have “been known to place there mature male police, security and other government officers who are on remand or otherwise detained” for protective custody.²⁰⁸

The routine mixing of boys with adult men in police lockups and some prisons increases their risk of sexual assault at the hands of older detainees.²⁰⁹ “The younger a boy is in prison, the greater his risk is of being sexually assaulted by inmates,” a doctor with long-term experience treating detainees explained.²¹⁰ Papua New Guinea reported to the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2002: “Young offenders also risk being sodomized and experience criminal acculturation, especially when they are mixed with adults.”²¹¹

Although Human Rights Watch did not interview boys who had been raped by other detainees, the head of the sexual offenses squad in East New Britain told us that “[t]here have been a few cases of rape in the cells of boys.”²¹² A guard at Boram Prison in Wewak also told us: “We recently had one person who described being raped. He asked to have his blood checked at the hospital. He checked for a [HIV] testing kit, but there weren’t any in the hospital. I raised the problem with the National AIDS Council. They said they would look at the matter.”²¹³

In addition to sexual abuse, boys detained with men are at risk of other forms of violence and criminal socialization. For example, Kalan P., age seventeen, explained what happened when he was detained in the adult wing of Bomana prison while awaiting trial:

When I got there the warden asked my age, . . . and then we went into the main [adult] compound with all different guys. There, other guys there came and asked me what I did. Then they bashed us up. They were older than us. One hit me on the head. Another broke a small bone in my hand and it still hurts me.²¹⁴

Kalan P. showed us a half-inch scar on his head that he said was from the beating.

Detention of Girls

Another problem is that not allpolice stations have separate cells for girls and women and that not all have women officers present at all times. In Wewak, which had only one cell, we saw girls sitting in a grassy courtyard whom police told us were detainees. The head of internal investigations for Wewak told us that if women and girls were arrested, there were no cells to put them in and they were kept in the police station. “They sleep in an office,” he explained. “Sometimes there are no female police officers in the station. There are three female police officers but they are working on shifts, so they are only there at night if they are on the night shift.”²¹⁵ A policewoman at the station told us that because there is no public transport at night, even when she is scheduled to work the night shift, she has to stay at home unless a police vehicle can pick her up. And “all the vehicles for our section are in the [repair] shop,” she said.²¹⁶

Having no separate cells for women and girls may make them especially at risk of sexual abuse by police when they are detained. A community police officer explained: “At the police station a girl who had been arrested doesn’t have a proper cell to sleep in, and she has to hang around the duty station, and the duty officer can say, ‘Come here for a while.’ They are vulnerable. I have seen this with my own eyes.”²¹⁷ However, as explained above, having separate cells does not by itself ensure their safety without additional monitoring and accountability for rape and sexual abuse.

Human Rights Watch did not visit police posts in very rural areas. However, according to Dr. Abby McLeod, who has studied and worked on policing in Papua New Guinea and has visited rural police lockups: “In any rural lockup in the provinces, they will mix women and men. In Mt. Hagen they put women in with men. . . . Policewomen tell me they don’t like putting women in with men because they will be raped.”²¹⁸

Denial of Medical Care

Police provide most detainees with no medical care, even when they are seriously injured.

Edmund P., whose arrest is described above, told us that after the police cut open his pinky finger with a pocket knife, he received no medical treatment until he was transferred to prison. “I never saw a doctor or a nurse or got any medical treatment until I came here [to the prison].” he said. “Here I was given some tablets, but I finished them.”²¹⁹ When we saw him in prison, his finger was unbandaged, very red and swollen, and split open at the end. A pediatrician who viewed photos of the wound told us that the wound showed signs of infection, but that it was healing, albeit abnormally.²²⁰ “It was certainly an injury that did not have medical treatment,” she noted. “It would have been easy to close.”²²¹

Jeffrey A., whose interrogation is described above, showed us a long scar across his eyebrow and cheekbone and told us it came from when police beat him on the street. At Boroko police station, where he was detained for three months, he said, “I didn’t get any medicine—my eye just eventually healed up.”²²²

Similarly, police provided the girls and women arrested in the March 2004 raid on the Three-Mile Guesthouse with no medical care, although some were bleeding and, according to NGO representatives who helped some detainees later get medical care, “one women’s hipbone had been chipped from being beaten by rifle butts.”²²³

A woman in Goroka described how she was able to get medical care for two relatives, ages seventeen and around sixteen, in December 2003:

Their eyes were all swollen—they had big faces with black eyes. The police had hit one of them in the eyebrow with a gun butt, and it was all scraped. Both were very injured. . . . It cost me two hundred kina [U.S.$64] each to bail them out and take them to the hospital. I couldn’t have taken them to the hospital unless I had paid the bail. We had to get our wantok to talk with the police in order to get them out.²²⁴

In some cases police appear to intentionally withhold or delay medical care as additional punishment or to let the swelling go down to cover up what they have done.²²⁵ This can compound the initial injury and make the victim more vulnerable to infection, scarring, permanent disability, and death. A doctor told us that he had seen “police keep the person in the cell without charging or creating a file until a lot of the swelling goes down. So by the time the person is able to access treatment, the wound is usually infected.”²²⁶

Kila U.’sarm had been amputated below the shoulder when we interviewed him. About six inches of loose flesh hung below his shoulder, marked by a long and twisted scar. A firm, well-circumscribed lump that felt like a foreign object protruded well above the skin surface towards the back of the shoulder. In August 2002, when he was seventeen years old, he was arrested for rape and murder, he told us.²²⁷ During the course of the arrest, he said, police shot him in the arm. Afterwards, they took him to Port Moresby General Hospital. “When I was taken to Port Moresby General Hospital, I know that I had two hands with me. . . . The doctor . . . asked me, ‘Did you do it’? I said, ‘No.’” Then, he told us,

I heard the police say, “If he has two hands, he’ll be a hard core criminal. So if you cut off one, he cannot do anything.” . . . Because the police gave the order to the doctor when I was lying on the bed, I heard them speaking. I was badly bashed up, so I couldn’t do anything.

For around three weeks, Kila U. said, he was not given any medical treatment or medicine:

They left me there and didn’t treat me until my hand became smelly. . . . For three weeks I was lying in bed. I couldn’t walk. I had lost a lot of blood. . .

Then they cut my arm off. . . . After they cut off my arm, they gave me tablets and put a bandage around my arm and washed off the blood. They gave me painkiller and [an antibiotic]. Some of the bullets are still in there. They still hurt—the bullets are still in!

The day after they cut off my arm, they took me to the police station for an interview. They interviewed me for the case of double murder. . . .

Then they took me back to the hospital. I stayed there for four weeks and then I came here [to prison].²²⁸

Separately, we interviewed a juvenile justice official who works in various police stations about the case.²²⁹ The official told us that he interviewed Kila U.in the police station in August 2002, the day after his arm was amputated, and that Kila U.hadtold him the same story then.

Jackson S., age seventeen, whose arrest in February 2004 is described above, explained what happened after police drove him to another place and shot him in both legs.²³⁰ His left leg was broken, he said, and the police took him to the hospital, deliberately jostling his leg while taking him there:

They were forcing me to walk into the hospital even though my leg was already broken. So they told the doctors not to treat me. They said, “He’s a criminal, so don’t treat him. Let him die.” . . . At 4 p.m. they bring me to the hospital. . . . At about 5 p.m. my family members came in and saw that my doctor doesn’t treat me, so they took me home and treated me themselves.

He never saw a doctor, he said. On March 1, he told us, criminal investigation division policecame to his house and took him again:

They came and broke my leg again. I don’t know who it was, but they were called CID. They took me to Boroko cell. I got no treatment, no treatment. I was there for one week with no water and food; I just stayed there. . . . I talked to the guards. They didn’t treat me [for my wounds]. They took me to the toilet but they didn’t do anything for me. They didn’t beat me; they just leave me like this. I just sleep where I was. I didn’t leave the cell. . . . My father asked them to bring me to the hospital, but they didn’t do anything. . . .

My father and mother bailed me so I could stay out of the jail. . . . They took me to hospital. They put on a splint, but they didn’t operate on the bullets. The bullets are still inside. . . .

On one leg, the bone joined back. The other side joined, but it’s still paining me.²³¹

A hospital nurse in East New Britain confirmed that in her experience, police often delay in bringing detainees for care and, when they leave detainees unguarded, the nurses are sometimes too afraid to treat them:

I work at a hospital and I have seen how police treat people. They don’t treat them like they are somebody. When they have injuries then they don’t bother treating them. . . . When [the detainees] are sick, they keep them until they are dying and then they take them to the hospital. They come, leave them in the hospital, and go away. . . . Only rarely do they bring food. . . . Even if we are trying to give medical care and they refuse, the police bash them up again. I have seen this. The prisoners don’t stay long—the police take them out. . . .

When somebody has done something serious, we feel scared. . . . Sometimes the nurses are too afraid to give treatment.²³²

The head of Wewak’s criminal investigation division told us that “vehicle problems” often kept them from taking detainees to the hospital: “If someone needs medical attention, . . . we take the medicine here. When it’s time, we give the medicine. At the station we don’t have medical supplies.”²³³ Similarly, when we visited Kokopo police station lockup, none of the detainees told us they had seen a doctor or been given any medicine, although some said they had asked.²³⁴ But some detainees did not appear to know they had a right to medical care. A man who told us that he was held in police lockup for two months with untreated sores when he was fourteen asked: “I want to understand what my rights really are. Should I get medical care even if I am bleeding from a police attack?”²³⁵

Legal Standards on the Detention of Children

The Convention on the Rights of the Child provides that arrest, detention, and imprisonment of a child “shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.”²³⁶ The best interests of the child must be a primary consideration.²³⁷International guidelines on the detention of juveniles also require that a parent or guardian be notified immediately when a child is apprehended.²³⁸

Papua New Guinea’s Constitution provides that all persons deprived of their liberty “shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”²³⁹ By law, once the person is brought to the station, the officer in charge must decide whether to release the person without charge or to charge the person with an offense.²⁴⁰ If the person is charged with an offense that is not a serious offense, police can grant or refuse bail.²⁴¹ If bail is refused, the person must be brought before a court as soon as possibleto decide bail and bail conditions.²⁴²

Separation of children from adults is a basic requirement of international law.²⁴³ International standards also require the separation of untried children from those convicted of crimes.²⁴⁴ Papua New Guinea’s constitution provides for the separation in custody of persons accused of a crime from those who have convicted, and those “under voting age” from others in custody; treatment appropriate to their age of “persons under voting age”; and refraining from transferring offenders to an area away from that of their relatives’ residence “except for reasons of security or other good cause.”²⁴⁵ Citizens may vote at age eighteen in Papua New Guinea. The Juvenile Courts Act requires the children under age seven be released to their parents, another responsible person, or a juvenile court officer; as a last resort they must be placed in a remand center or other place approved by the Director of the Juvenile Court Services. Children ages seven and older must be placed in a remand center or other approved place.²⁴⁶ Although the act does not explicitly say that children may not be detained with adults, the act authorizes the detention of children only in a juvenile section of a corrective institution, a juvenile institution, or a remand center.²⁴⁷  Protocols for magistrate and police on implementing the act also require detention in a separate juvenile cell.

Under the U.N. Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty, the following information about each child must be recorded in every place where children are detained:

• Information on the identity of the juvenile;
• The fact of and reasons for commitment and the authority therefore;
• The day and hour of admission, transfer and release;
• Details of the notifications to parents and guardians on every admission, transfer or release of the juvenile in their care at the time of commitment;
• Details of known physical and mental health problems, including drug and alcohol abuse.²⁴⁸

The Juvenile Courts Act requires that “[t]he Superintendent of an institution, other than the juvenile section of a corrective institution . . . keep a record in respect of each juvenile in custody of the institution” containing “such particulars as are prescribed.”²⁴⁹

International standards require that children deprived of their liberty “have the right to facilities and services that meet all the requirements of health and human dignity," and to "be provided with separate and sufficient bedding, which should be clean when issued, kept in good order, and changed often enough to ensure cleanliness.”²⁵⁰ Children should be provided with adequate bathing and shower installations to enable every prisoner to bathe “as frequently as necessary for general hygiene . . . but at least once a week in a temperate climate.”²⁵¹ Children should also have access to clean drinking water at all times, and access to sanitary installations as necessary.²⁵² The U.N. Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty further provide that children in detention must receive food at normal meal times and of a quality and quantity to satisfy the standards of health and hygiene.²⁵³ Conditions of extreme crowding in detention facilities violate children's right under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, facilitate the spread of disease, and may contribute to violence among detainees.

Draft “Minimum Standards for Juvenile Institutions” of the Department of Justice and Attorney General, which had not been implemented at the time of writing, contain provisions similar to those in the international standards, as do Papua New Guinea’s “Correctional Services Strategy for Management of Youth Detainees (2001),” which applies to children in the custody of correctional services.

As detailed above, when viewed as a whole, the conditions of many police lockups amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and customary international law.

Medical Care in Detention

The U.N. Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty provide detailed guidelines on the minimum standards of medical care guaranteed children deprived of their liberty.²⁵⁴ The U.N. Rules require that children deprived of their liberty be provided with adequate preventive and remedial medical care.²⁵⁵ As part of that care, every child has a right to be examined by a physician immediately upon admission to a detention facility.²⁵⁶ Medical services should also seek to detect and treat any physical or mental illness, substance abuse, or other condition that may hinder the child's integration into society.²⁵⁷ Every detention facility should have immediate access to adequate medical facilities and staff trained in preventive health care and the handling of medical emergencies, and a medical officer should promptly examine every child who is ill, who complains of illness, or who shows symptoms of physical or mental difficulties.²⁵⁸ The U.N. Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials also states that “law enforcement officials shall ensure the full protection of the health of persons in their custody and in particular, shall take immediate action to secure medical attention whenever required.”²⁵⁹

Papua New Guinea’s Juvenile Courts Act also requires that institutions for juveniles arrange for “the provision of medical treatment as required for a juvenile committed to it,” as do the draft “Minimum Standards for Juvenile Institutions” and “Correctional Services Strategy for Management of Youth Detainees (2001).”²⁶⁰

In serious cases, several of which are detailed above, the state’s failure to provide adequate medical treatment to children in police lockup amounts to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.