Write for the OPR Journal
Pitches are open. OPR is accepting pitches now on prisons, detention and justice in Somalia and across Africa. Write in English, or in Somali for writing on Somalia.
The OPR Journal publishes writing by people outside the organization on prisons, detention, and justice in Somalia and across Africa. Pitch first. If the idea works, we commission it, edit it with you, and publish it under the name you choose.
What we publish, and how long
| Type | What it is | Length |
|---|---|---|
| Case report | One person, one detention, one death, one court decision — what happened, with dates, places and sources. | 600–1,200 words |
| Investigation | A facility, a practice, or a pattern, documented with interviews and records. The Journal's main form. | 1,500–3,500 words; longer by agreement |
| Testimony | A first-person account of detention — your own, or one you recorded with the person's consent. | 800–2,500 words |
| Analysis | Legal, policy or historical writing on Somalia's penal system: what the law says, what the courts do, what changed and why. | 1,200–2,500 words |
| Policy briefing | A problem, the evidence, and numbered recommendations addressed to a named institution. | 1,000–2,000 words |
| Reporting from the regions | Detention in the Federal Member States and Somaliland, where it is least documented. Any of the forms above. | As the form |
| Photo essay | Eight to fifteen photographs with captions and a short text. You must hold the rights and the consent of anyone shown. | 300–800 words |
Word counts are guides, not walls. A 500-word case report that says everything is better than a 1,200-word one that repeats itself. If your material needs more than the limit, say so in the pitch.
Topics we publish
The Journal covers prisons, detention and justice in Somalia and in the rest of Africa. These are the subjects we look for:
- Prison conditions. Overcrowding, food, water and healthcare, deaths in custody, torture, and solitary confinement.
- Due process. Wrongful conviction, denial of a lawyer, military prosecution of civilians and children, and arbitrary or indefinite detention.
- Minorities and vulnerable prisoners. Bantu/Jareerweyne, Benadiri, Gaboye, Eyle, Bajuni and Madhiban prisoners; women in detention; people with disabilities in custody.
- Enforced disappearance. People who vanished from custody, and the patterns behind it.
- State actors and accountability. The conduct of NISA, the police and prison administrations, and impunity.
- Journalists, activists and dissidents who are detained.
- Policy and reform. Penal-code reform, alternatives to prison, and Somalia's obligations under the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture.
The same subjects apply to writing from other African countries: prison conditions, due process, deaths in custody, and reform. Compare your country with Somalia, or let your reporting stand alone.
How to write for OPR
Plain language. Write the way you would explain it to a person in Mogadishu who knows the country but was not there. Short sentences. Say what happened before you say what it means. No jargon: not "stakeholders", "capacity-building", "the relevant authorities" — say who, by name.
Use the names people use. CID, NISA, Villa Somalia, Godka Jilacow, the Custodial Corps, the military court. Spell an acronym out the first time — Criminal Investigation Department (CID) — then use the short form. Don't invent formal names for things everyone calls something else.
Be exact. Dates, not "recently". Names of places, not "a facility in the south". Numbers, with where they came from. If you don't know, say you don't know; the Journal publishes "OPR could not confirm" rather than a guess.
Show your sources. Who told you, when, and how they know — anonymised where safety requires, but never absent. Documents you hold, say so. Anyone criticised in the piece will be offered a chance to respond before publication.
People, not categories. A detainee has a name, or a reason for not having one on the page. Write about the person in front of you, then what their case shows.
Who we particularly want to hear from
Women. Almost everything written about Somali prisons is written by men, about men. Women are in the story everywhere: as detainees, whose treatment the Bangkok Rules exist to protect and who almost never speak publicly; as the wives, mothers, and sisters who carry the weight of a man's detention — the visits, the food, the search for a lawyer or a body; as activists and journalists; and as officers and lawyers inside the system. OPR wants writing by women on all of it. Two standing calls are open: Women and Detention — women's wings, women's cases, the families' side, women in the system — and Testimony, in your own words. Named or not, Somali or English.
People with disabilities. People with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental health disabilities are held in Somalia's prisons and police cells, and the record barely mentions them — least of all in their own voice. OPR wants writing by people with disabilities about detention: your own, a family member's, or what you have seen. If reading or typing is a barrier, dictate it: send a voice note to OPR on WhatsApp at +252 61 977 5580 or ask for a phone interview, and OPR will transcribe and edit it with you. Tell us what format works for you and we will use it.
Somalis detained abroad. A large part of Somalia's prison story happens outside Somalia, and almost none of it is written from the Somali side. In the United States, deportation protection for Somalis ended in January 2026; men arrested in Minneapolis in December's sweep were held at Guantánamo Bay and flown to Mogadishu in chains via Dakar and Nairobi in September. In Libya, Somali officials counted roughly three hundred Somalis in prisons in the east and south this August — seventy in Ganfuda prison in Benghazi alone, eight of them women, one with her three-year-old — and repatriation flights keep bringing back people who were held in detention centres for months. Somalis convicted of piracy served sentences in the Seychelles, Kenya, India, Europe and the United States and were transferred to Hargeisa, Bosaso and Garowe; as piracy returns in 2026, so will the prosecutions. Add to that Somalis convicted of ordinary crimes in Europe, the Gulf, Kenya and Ethiopia, and Somalis facing deportation from countries that were home for decades. OPR wants this documented by the people who lived it and the families who waited: the arrest, the trial in a language you didn't speak, the prison, the flight home, what happened after. A standing call, Somalis Detained Abroad, is open, and you can pitch it in Somali or English.
Africa and the world. The Journal also publishes writing about detention and justice beyond Somalia: prisons and police cells elsewhere in Africa, and the justice systems of any country, by people who know them from inside. Comparison is useful — what Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, or a European country does with pretrial detention, with mental health in prison, with deaths in custody — and so is reporting that stands alone. Write from your country, in English; OPR will publish it beside Somalia's.
Special cases. A single case that reveals a system: a death in custody nobody investigated, a conviction that fell apart, a person held for years without charge, an extradition, a disappearance. If you hold the documents or the testimony, OPR will help you build it into a case report or an investigation.
First-time writers. If you have never published, that is not a reason to hold back. A pitch with a real story and real access gets a full edit with you, not a rejection for style.
Which language to write in
You can write in Somali or in English. You also choose the language it is published in. If you write in Somali and want it published in English, OPR translates it and you approve the translation before it goes out. If you want it published in Somali, it is published in Somali. Where a piece matters in both, we publish both versions, linked to each other. Pitches on Somalia can be sent in either language. Somali is for writing on Somalia, including writing on Somalis detained abroad. Pitches on other African countries, and from elsewhere in the world, are accepted in English only.
What we don't publish
Opinion without new facts. Anything that cannot be sourced. Attacks on individuals that serve no public interest. Material already published elsewhere, unless you own it and we agree a version for OPR. Writing with no link to prisons, detention or justice. Anything that would put a detainee or a witness at risk without their consent.
Outside our scope? If your story is about something other than prisons, detention and justice, such as elections, security, politics or rights outside custody, you can pitch The Field, an independent news site founded by OPR's chairperson, Ismail Abukar. OPR and The Field are separate organisations. It answers every pitch within 48 hours.
How it works
Send a pitch using the form below or to [email protected]. We reply to every pitch, usually within two weeks. If we commission, we agree a length, a deadline, and how you will be named. You write; we edit for accuracy, clarity, and safety, and every change is shown to you before publication. Anyone criticized in the piece is given a chance to respond. When it is published, it is dated, sourced, and kept online.
Rights and payment
You keep the copyright to your work and can republish it elsewhere after it appears on OPR, with a note that it first appeared here. OPR is a volunteer-run organization and does not currently pay for Journal contributions; we say so plainly so that nobody is misled. What we offer is careful editing, a platform read by people working on Somalia's justice system, and a permanent, citable record of your work.
Original work only
The Journal publishes what people have seen, gathered, and written themselves. We do not accept pieces written or substantially drafted by artificial intelligence, and we do not accept text that has been generated and then edited into shape. Every submission is screened with AI-detection tools and read closely by an editor; where the writing does not read as the author's own, we will ask about how it was produced, and we may decline it. Detection tools are not infallible, so the editor's judgement, not the tool, is what decides.
Some uses of AI are acceptable, on one condition: you tell us. Checking grammar and spelling. Translating your own writing between Somali and English. Light help with structure — an outline, the order of sections, a suggestion on where a paragraph belongs. None of these will cause a piece to be declined, provided the facts, the reporting, and the writing itself are yours and you disclose the help when you submit. Undisclosed use, or use that goes beyond this, will.
What we are protecting is simple: a testimony, an investigation, or an analysis has value because a person stands behind it.
Safety
If publishing under your own name could put you or your family at risk, tell us in the pitch. We publish under pseudonyms, remove identifying detail, and never share a contributor's identity. If this email address is not safe for a reply, say so and tell us how to reach you.
What a strong pitch contains
A pitch can be a paragraph or two. The form below asks for five things:
- What happened. Who, where and when.
- Why it matters. What the reader will learn.
- What is new. What has not been reported, or what you can show that others cannot.
- Your sources and access. Interviews you can get, documents you hold, places you have been.
- Safety. Anything we need to protect you or the people in the piece.
Read before you pitch
To see the standard we edit to, read recent OPR work: Inside the Shadows (investigation), The Invisible Cell (investigation), The Vaults of Impunity (investigation) and Reclaiming the Constitutional Promise (policy analysis). You can also browse all investigations and news.