UN investigator tells of horrors of world prisons

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Inmates at a prison in Uruguay can spend years in "tin cans" -- small metal boxes where temperatures rise to 140 degrees F (60 degrees C), while women and children were among prisoners in Nigeria confined to a "torture room."

Those were among the abuses chronicled in a report released on Tuesday by Manfred Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer and U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other forms of cruel and inhuman treatment and punishment.

Speaking to reporters after submitting his report to the U.N. General Assembly, Nowak said he focused on "forgotten prisons" and the treatment of children in the dozens of countries he visited.

Nowak said women and children in Lagos, Nigeria, were among the more than 100 detainees confined to the "torture room" of the Criminal Investigation Department, where torture methods included the firing of gunshots into legs and leaving the severely injured prisoners without medical treatment.

There are some 10 million people behind bars worldwide, most of them in unacceptable circumstances, Nowak said.

"My guess is that the clear majority of them have to be in conditions that are violating human dignity," he said.

One widespread problem is overcrowding, which Nowak said he witnessed during visits to countries like Georgia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Togo.

In Indonesia and Paraguay, he said, detainees were not only deprived of food and medicine but were sometimes forced to pay a daily fee for their "accommodation" in prison cells.