DR Congo: Over 500 Deaths At Makala Prison In 2023-Clinton Foundation Report

By Badylon Kawanda Bakiman

Located in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Makala central prison, the country's largest, recorded 505 inmate deaths from January to November 2023 due to poor prison conditions.

The Bill Clinton Foundation for Peace, one of the DRC's human rights organizations, made this information public in a report released the day before yesterday in Kinshasa.

According to the report, the main cause of deaths in Congolese prisons is the slowness of judicial proceedings.

The report was based on an investigation into the failure to deliver judgments within the legal timeframe, and human rights violations in the DRC.

The Foundation called on the Government, through the Ministries of Justice and Human Rights, to decongest prisons and speed up judicial proceedings.

"Built for a capacity of 1,500 inmates, Makala Central Prison now has more than 13,500, reported the Bill Clinton Peace Foundation. The majority of them are remand prisoners", the report states.

For its part, the government, through the voice of Lydia Masika, director of the DRC's penitentiary services, defended itself in the following terms: "There are many detainees who are arrested in a very poor state of health already, sometimes hanging around in the dungeons of the security services. We don't know exactly how they ended up in such a state, because they come in skinny, sometimes in an irrecoverable state. Those who come to Makala prison and can be recuperated, are recuperated because at least, there is good medical and nutritional care".