2023-07-13 03:30:00
On November 20, 2019, the Provincial Committee for the Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPPT) was created in Neuquén through Law 3213. It is a relatively new body -in line with the conventions international organizations to which our country adhered several decades ago- which has among its responsibilities the monitoring of detention spaces, the preparation of proposals and recommendations on public policies that tend to improve the situation of persons deprived of liberty, training, education, dissemination and awareness of the problems related to situations of confinement.
However, Years go by and the body does not begin to function, because the Honorable Legislature of the Province of Neuquén does not comply with the law that it itself sanctioned. The regulation of said standard only took place on December 9, 2021, two years later, and the selection process for its members began late in 2022. In August Human Rights organizations proposed their representatives to join the body, and those people were evaluated and selected before the end of that legislative period.
But it would not be until March of this year when the chamber would finally and unanimously approve the appointment of the commissioners. However, after this laborious process there were no more definitions. Just silence; and the impossibility even for the members of the Committee to meet with the president of the Legislature, who has in his signature the responsibility that this prevention mechanism begins to work, since the creation of the positions depends on his heading and the allocation of the budget and physical space to start doing it.
Why doesn’t the provincial government comply with the law? Will you consider that it is not necessary? Clearly, that would not be a sensible response, since currently the prisons in our province They are overcrowded and the conditions in which they live there are inhumane people deprived of their liberty. In the majority, the right to work is not exercised and educational spaces are precarious and practically non-existent.
The main detention units in the province were closed by court order and have begun to overpopulate the police stations, which are not prepared for the habitability of people permanently detained.
Conditions that are far removed from those ordered by our National Constitution in its article No. 18, where it establishes that prisons must be for security and not for the punishment of the people who inhabit them.
According to the latest report published by the National System of Statistics on the Execution of Sentences, there is an overpopulation of 5.6% in Neuquén. With alarming situations such as Detention Unit No. 41 of Junín de los Andes, which reached an overpopulation of 192.3% and that of the Detainee Accommodation Center of San Martín de los Andes with an overpopulation of 100%.
It is necessary to underline that National Law 24660 on the Execution of Sentences, enacted in 1996, establishes that every person deprived of their liberty has the right to work, health, education and affective bonding. And if there is a fact of this reality that has been proven, it is that the exercise of those rights generally denied significantly reduces the levels of recidivism, given that detainees who manage to exercise them have more and very valuable tools to feel included -and effectively manage to include himself- when it comes to recovering his freedom.
It is worth emphasizing that the only right that a person convicted of a crime loses is freedom of movement, nothing more. Not anything less. Of course, it may be little for the punitive and stigmatizing views that undoubtedly exist in our society, and that legitimize the absence of public policies that guarantee the human rights of those who are deprived of their liberty wishing that they “rot in jail.”
A catchphrase that is usually heard more than desired and that accounts for another of the problems where the Committee should be acting, developing awareness-raising, dissemination and training strategies on this problem.
As Nelson Mandela argued, “a nation should not be judged by how it treats its better-off citizens, but by how it treats those who have little or nothing.”
If we transfer this reflection to the province of Neuquén and the lethargy of its government in the implementation of its torture prevention mechanism, that trial cannot be positive.
* Historian. Professor and researcher at the National University of Comahue. Selected to integrate the Neuquén Provincial Committee against Torture
* Graduate in Social Communication UNLZ. Specialist in Communication and Cultures UNCO. UNRN professor. Selected to integrate the Neuquén Provincial Committee against torture.
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