A Second Year Behind Closed Doors: Somalia’s Prisons in 2021
- In March 2021, al-Shabaab attacked Bosaso Central Prison in Puntland and claimed to have freed more than 400 prisoners.
- Also in March, Somaliland suspended all visits to inmates in its fourteen prisons because of a COVID-19 resurgence.
- The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the relevant ministries of justice helped release more than 1,000 low-risk prisoners and supplied protective equipment to three Puntland prisons.
- In June, Ikran Tahlil Farah, an employee of Somalia’s intelligence agency (the National Intelligence and Security Agency, NISA), disappeared in Mogadishu, a case that showed how little outside scrutiny reaches the agency’s detention system.
- I have found no published count of COVID-19 infections or deaths inside Somalia’s prisons for 2021.
By 2021, COVID-19 was no longer an emergency measure in Somalia. It was a condition of life. For prisoners, that meant a second year of restricted contact, uneven supplies, and a health system that could not offer testing or treatment inside a cell.
Little of the response in 2021 came from the state. The most detailed account of what was done comes from international agencies and from the accounts of prisoners themselves.
In March 2021, Somaliland’s Justice Minister Saleban Warsame Guled announced that all visits to inmates in the country’s fourteen prisons were suspended to protect them from a resurgence of COVID-19.
A blanket suspension protects against infection entering through visitors. It also cuts prisoners off from the relatives who supply food, medicine and money. In a system where inmates without family support have very limited access to basic services, visits are part of how prisoners survive, not a privilege added on top. I could not find published information on how long the suspension lasted or what replaced the support visits normally provided.
On March 5, al-Shabaab fighters attacked the central prison in Bosaso, Puntland’s commercial capital. The police commander for Bari region said security forces had pushed the attackers back, that a number of prisoners had escaped, and that one soldier had been killed. Al-Shabaab said it had freed more than 400 prisoners, including some held for more than ten years, and claimed it had freed women and girls as well, a detail that was unconfirmed.
Two days later, Puntland’s military said it had recaptured 87 of the prisoners who escaped, and the same report put the number of Puntland soldiers killed at seven. The early figure of one soldier killed and the later figure of seven are both on the record, and the true totals for guards, attackers and prisoners have not, as far as I have found, been published in full.
I could not find reporting on how the prisoners who remained at Bosaso, or those recaptured, were treated afterwards.
The most concrete measure to reduce risk that I found documented for 2021 came from a partnership between UNDP, funded by the Government of Japan, and the ministries of justice. UNDP reported that it supplied masks, hand sanitiser, water tanks, soap and gloves to prisons in Gardo, Bosaso and Galkayo, and worked with the ministries to identify low-risk prisoners who could be released. These included pregnant women, older people and those close to the end of their sentences. The teams also identified prisoners who had already served their sentences but had not been released because of administrative oversights.
UNDP said more than 1,000 prisoners were released early. (Its published text prints the figure as “1,0000”, an evident typo, and the accompanying sentence says more than 1,000.)
The account includes a prisoner in Gardo, Puntland, who described how frightening the start of the pandemic was: he and others feared that if infected people were arrested and brought in, they would all die inside one after another. He was among those released after advocacy from UNDP and the Ministry of Justice.
On June 26, 2021, NISA employee Ikran Tahlil Farah disappeared in Mogadishu. OPR documented the case in a report, Who Silenced Ikran?, which sets out the contested accounts, including differing claims by NISA and by al-Shabaab, and the obligations Somalia has under the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
I do not repeat the details of that report here. The point for this series is narrower: in 2021, as prisons and courts operated under restrictions, a person could disappear from the streets of the capital, and the agency’s own account of what happened could not be independently tested.
The second year of the pandemic shows a pattern. Where prisoners were protected, it was through releases arranged with outside help. Where visits were suspended, no substitute for what visits provided was announced. Where a prison was attacked, the public record is incomplete. And in every case, prisoners’ own health was the least documented part of the story.
I have not found any published count of infections, hospitalisations or deaths from COVID-19 in Somalia’s prisons in 2021. Without those figures, no one can say whether the measures worked. The next report covers 2022, when the emergency measures ended but the conditions they were meant to address remained.
OPR calls for the publication of prison-by-prison health and mortality data for every year since March 2020; a review of every prisoner held beyond the end of a sentence, with a standing mechanism to prevent it happening again; alternatives to blanket suspension of visits, including protected visiting arrangements and guaranteed food and medicine supply; a public account of who was held, injured, killed or recaptured after the Bosaso attack; and independent access to all detention facilities, including those run by intelligence agencies.
How to cite this piece
Abukar, Ismail, for the Organization for Prisoners' Rights. (2021). A Second Year Behind Closed Doors: Somalia’s Prisons in 2021. Mogadishu: OPR. https://opr.org.so/news/covid-prisons-2021/