A Law for the Agency, Not the Prisoner: Somalia’s Prisons in 2023

By Ismail Abukar | Organization for Prisoners’ Rights (OPR) | 27 September 2023

• Three years after COVID-19 arrived, the U.S. State Department still reported life-threatening tuberculosis and cholera outbreaks in overcrowded prisons, especially Mogadishu Central Prison.
• Families were still generally required to pay for inmates’ health services, and inmates without family or clan support had very limited access to them.
• Independent monitors reported no improvements to address allegations of mistreatment or to improve conditions, and Somaliland reportedly did not permit independent observers from non-governmental organisations into prisons.
• The year’s main legal change, the intelligence agency law, expanded the powers of the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) to detain people, while the safeguards it contained were rarely applied.
• OPR’s 2023 assessment counted 1,929 convicted prisoners at Mogadishu Central Prison, up from 1,540 a year earlier, and 104 verified deaths in Mogadishu’s prisons since 2019.

By 2023, the emergency measures of the pandemic years were history. The conditions they had been meant to manage were not.

The State Department’s 2023 report recorded life-threatening outbreaks of diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera, particularly in overcrowded prisons such as the Mogadishu Central Prison. Authorities generally required families to pay for inmates’ health services, and inmates without family or clan support had very limited access to them. Human rights advocates in Puntland raised serious concerns about Garowe Prison, where inmates faced shortages of water, food and electricity, at a prison the State Department’s 2020 report had named among the few that met international standards. The report said independent monitors did not report any improvements to address mistreatment or to improve conditions, and that Somaliland reportedly did not permit independent observers from non-governmental organisations to monitor prisons. It also called lengthy pretrial detention a common problem, and said access to counsel for pretrial detainees was poorly documented.

OPR’s 2023 assessment gives the numbers behind this. A survey found 1,929 convicted prisoners at Mogadishu Central Prison (1,792 men, 28 women and 109 boys) and 309 at the Mogadishu Prison and Court Complex, with 953 people held awaiting trial (on remand). A year earlier the central prison held 1,540 convicted prisoners and 1,134 on remand, so the convicted population there rose by about a quarter and the remand population fell by about 16 percent. The prison was designed for 400 to 500 people. OPR verified 104 deaths in Mogadishu’s prisons and detention facilities since the start of 2019, and counted 47 prisoners who had served their sentences and remained inside, a figure it could not independently verify. At Godka Jilacow it recorded 98 political prisoners and 198 people associated with al-Shabaab, also unverified, and a further 234 detainees were held in 18 district police stations and 74 at the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID), the police detective service.

Health conditions were as they had been. OPR found no isolation for tuberculosis patients and no TB medication, cholera and diarrhoea outbreaks that caused multiple deaths and 38 hospitalisations, no ambulance in any facility, and hygiene judged unacceptable in 80 percent of facilities, with over 60 percent lacking adequate sleeping amenities. OPR described some of the highest rates of acute malnutrition it had observed and said the pressures of climate, conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic had all contributed. An inmate quoted in the report said he had attended a hygiene seminar on the coronavirus outbreak and been taught how to wash his hands, but that inmates mostly did not receive soap.

Access had a price, and sometimes no route at all. Visits, once permitted every Sunday and Wednesday, had been banned for over a year, OPR’s report said. This is a separate, later restriction from the COVID-era visit ban discussed in Part 1 — visits had resumed by August 2020, and the two accounts do not describe the same suspension. OPR’s own reporting does not give a start date for the ban it recorded in 2023. I place its start at around January or February 2022, though the exact date is not established. The same “over a year” duration recurs unchanged in the 2024 and 2025 reports, so it is not clear from OPR’s published figures alone whether this reflects one continuing restriction, a series of restrictions, or an unupdated figure. Where a visit was allowed, visitors could not bring food, were charged $20, and waited from 7am to 3pm behind a barrier. A prison staff member told OPR he ran a restaurant inside the prison, and an inmate said a small portion of rice without soup cost about $1. Prisoners paid $5 for ten minutes outside their cells. OPR also learned that prisoners who refused to buy food were punished with solitary confinement: held undressed for up to five days without food or water, in a room filled with drained vehicle oil, and beaten before being returned to their cells. Inmates also said they were made to pay for drinking water, and that donations, including dates and powdered milk from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), were withheld unless paid for.

The pattern matters more than any single figure. During COVID, visits were cut and families kept prisoners alive with food and medicine. By 2023, visits were still cut, and what remained of family contact, food, water and fresh air could be bought.

In February 2023, Somalia’s Senate passed a bill giving the National Intelligence and Security Agency powers of arrest, detention and surveillance. Human Rights Watch warned of sweeping powers with minimal independent oversight, including warrantless arrests in undefined “emergency situations” and access to a lawyer and family only after 48 hours. The State Department later said the signed law required warrants, prompt notification of charges and access to counsel, and that adherence to these safeguards was rare.

OPR’s annual assessment counted 37 young men detained by NISA in 21 incidents in 2023, after 17 people, including eight journalists and nine al-Shabaab suspects, the year before, and 89 people detained by the Somali Police Force in 2023 security sweeps. Across the four years from 2020 to 2023, OPR’s own reporting puts the Somali Police Force’s security-sweep detentions at 307 people in total \u2014 101 in 2020, 66 in 2021, 51 in 2022, and 89 in 2023. In Mogadishu during 2023, NISA, then led by Mahad Salad, intensified its targeting of independent journalists and critics. In the cases I have documented, people who reported critically on the federal offensive against al-Shabaab were declared national security threats under the new law and held in isolation at CID and NISA sites.

For prisoners who had lived through COVID-era restrictions, the new law did not restore what was lost. It widened the number of places where people could be held out of sight.

Fighting broke out in Las Anod in February 2023 between Somaliland forces and SSC-Khatumo, a local administration aligned with Somalia’s federal government. After the fighting, the ICRC visited more than 300 Somaliland detainees held in Las Anod and had already visited SSC-Khatumo detainees held in Hargeisa Central Prison. Somaliland’s government condemned what it called inhumane treatment of its captured soldiers. Human rights groups raised concerns about prisoners on both sides. In my own documentation, captured Somaliland commanders were placed in permanent isolation to block coordination, and wounded prisoners were denied medical treatment. Parallel abuses were documented on the SSC-Khatumo side, where captured Somaliland soldiers were subjected to retaliatory clan-based isolation.

These were new prisoners entering systems with no spare capacity, no medical infrastructure and no independent access, exactly the conditions COVID had shown to be dangerous.

Three years on, the record shows a system in which the underlying conditions had not been addressed, in which the price of basic access had risen, and in which new detention powers and a new war had added to the number of people held. I found no evidence of a recovery that could be measured. Where there is a measure, it points the wrong way.

OPR calls for publication of prison-by-prison population, health and mortality data every year; an end to fees for visits, food, water and sunlight; free medical care for every prisoner, whether or not their family can pay; access for independent monitors to prisons in Somaliland and to every place NISA holds detainees; enforcement of the constitutional 48-hour rule with named officials accountable when it is broken; and the immediate release or trial of every prisoner held beyond the end of a sentence.

About the author

Ismail Abukar is an independent investigative journalist and Chairperson of the Organization for Prisoners’ Rights (OPR), an independent nonprofit based in Mogadishu. He holds an MA in International Law and Human Rights from UPEACE. [email protected]

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