Benin : The Heartfelt Cry Of A Political Prisoner Whose Rights Are Trampled On Even In The Jails

By Reckya Madougou*

In what state of law is a prisoner forbidden to telephone even his children and his attending physician when he is unwell, and regardless of the law? This is what I alone have to endure at Missérété prison.

I'm carrying my cross and I'll outlive you, thank God, whatever torments and humiliations you inflict on me. The ordeal I endure day after day is nameless, in defiance of the request for my release by the UN Working Group, which declared my detention to be triply arbitrary. The real "witchcraft" is to forcefully detain opponents, deprive them of their fundamental rights and do everything possible to muzzle them so that they are forgotten and abandoned. It's a lost cause. You'll hear from us. Notwithstanding the ostracism to which I myself am subjected. No injustice is meant to be hidden under a bushel for long.

I've heard from those close to me all the untruths alleged by the authorities, who contradict each other on the torturous and discriminatory management of my prison life. And this has been the case for the last three years. My silence at a given moment was hardly consent, but a personal option in line with my self-imposed spiritual journey. However, there are times when the abuse of oppression calls for protest out of an instinct for survival.

I know, from the evidence I've accumulated over the years, that a special torture agenda is dedicated to me. The authorities are aware of this, and many well-known and anonymous visitors alike have experienced it. Thus, only the administration of the Akpro-Missérété Civil Prison (PCAM) has received firm instructions regarding the illegal and ferocious nature of the prison regime imposed on me. Most of the officers who have succeeded one another there are doing their utmost, with a redoubtable zeal, headed by the Director General (DG) of the Benin Prison Agency (APB), Mr François Hounkpè. I shall address him publicly this time, for the sake of history.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nelson Mandela Rules, the United Nations Convention against Torture and the United Nations Convention against Discrimination against Women are all international legal instruments that enshrine the rights of detainees, but which, Mr. APB CEO, you have deliberately chosen to deny me in order to preserve your position. Incidentally, I'm not begging you for a favor, I'm simply inviting you to carry out your duties in compliance with the provisions of article 35 of our Constitution.

For the past three years, Mr. General Manager, you have been abusively and discriminately violating my basic rights, including the right to telephone my children. All prisoners, even those with blood on their hands, enjoy these rights on a daily basis. In fact, under the sordid apartheid regime, the most famous prisoner in modern history, Mandela, was able to use the telephone booths in the Robben Island prison fortress.

I still remember the day before the "brevet des collèges" exam in June 2023. Although within my rights, I begged your staff to allow me to make a call to my son to tell him how much I love him and to advise him to be mentally strong to face this turning point in his studies, as every parent does to his offspring as school exams approach. I suggested to my jailers that they be present during the call to follow the conversation if they wished. Distressed, your people reassured me that this time I would win my case, even alleging that you were present in the prison and that the Minister of Justice, Détchénou, had also been informed and would soon give us a supposedly favorable response. Oh nay! It was all a bluff. I was wrong to believe in any humanism on your part. But I let it slide again. I shouldn't have, because any bullying that goes unreported is a breeding ground for more dramatic excesses.

I don't need to remind you of all the lies you've told here and the embarrassment you've caused by your own arguments. You've gone so far as to make me believe that my inability to access the telephone booths is simply a logistical failure that you'll soon fix, even though the phones in question are wireless (mobile). Nonsense...

You also state in your press release that I am receiving a visit from my doctor. But you conveniently omit to point out that, on the one hand, this was obtained after a hard year's struggle and, on the other hand, especially since 2022, when I have experienced various health crises that have led to the prescription of a battery of examinations by specialists who have examined me, your successive managers have never extracted me to go and do them. Their motives vary according to the day and their mood. Sometimes, the President of the Republic wouldn't have authorized it (this is the most frequent reason given to me in these terms: "Madam, please understand that your case is managed directly from the palace, there's nothing we can do about it"); sometimes their hierarchy (you, the DG) refused to allow me to go and carry out my various examinations and X-rays in hospitals, as all prisoners have access to. Or maybe it was the Special Public Prosecutor (PS) who wouldn't allow it. Such deception!

I'll spare you the episode of my crisis in 2021, but since 2022, when every night is an atrocity that I'm constantly exposing to the prison administration, the stewards, the PS and the Ministers of Justice, how many letters have my advisors and I sent? It's only in these first days of April 2024, more than two years later, that I'm allowed to take my exams. At least partially. A new request had to be submitted to the PS, which had previously received several letters on the same issue. Such peregrinations and dilatory tactics, even when it comes to health issues!

Yet every day, my fellow inmates visit public and private health centers, some several times a week. In two years, anything could have happened to me, since my doctor's recent consultation clearly mentions the serious risks involved. MORE THAN TWO YEARS to obtain a simple authorization to carry out medical examinations in hospitals on the national territory.

And to top it all off, despite the resurgence of my pain, confirmed by the X-ray, I'm forbidden to telephone my personal physician to pass on the results of the tests carried out and discuss the identified pathology with him, pending his next trip to Benin. Yet none of you are unaware that the law gives me the right to do so, and that other prisoners benefit from it. Better still, health is a matter of confidentiality, security and trust.

Nor does my right to information and leisure activities for my mental equilibrium escape the indictment of my deprivations. It's impossible to have a simple radio, as the other inmates each have their own, when your name is Reckya Madougou. In a prison where individual air-conditioning units, refrigerators, freezers, TV sets with access to international channels, microwave ovens, video game consoles... are legion among the privileged, as international NGOs passing through have noted. I won't go into further detail, as you won't be restoring justice in my favor, but rather simulating a dispossession of the people concerned, who won't take a month to reintroduce the aforementioned household appliances into their homes. And it's their right to enjoy them. This is the circus you indulge in every time your double standards are denounced. I'm the beast you're trying to stun at any cost. But "He who is in me is stronger than he who is in the world".

As regards the news of Wednesday March 29, for ages visitors of all kinds have been scouring Benin's prisons, from north to south, meeting inmates, including political ones. They don't need a permit to visit. The same visitors, civilians as well as politicians, who are common acquaintances of the political detainees spread across Benin's prisons, have never presented any kind of visiting permit before gaining access to other detainees, and they are surprised every time that only Reckya Madougou is not accessible to them, sometimes even thinking it's a whim on my part.

Mr. DG, taking you at your word, since February 2023 when you miraculously unearthed, from the rubble of our country's revolutionary prehistory, the condition of a visitation permit for me, many members of my biological and political family, friends and relatives have written to the PS in order to obtain this sesame, without success. You're forcing us to go through a series of trials and tribulations that are never followed up!

But what cynicism! Contrary to the allegations made, many members of my family and VIPs who came individually to Missérété were prevented from seeing me. It's not just my group visitors who have been turned away. The Honorable Nourenou Atchadé, former minister Alassane Tigri, former minister Galiou Soglo, individual Les Démocrates deputies, and many anonymous people sympathetic to my grief all sought to see me individually. All were systematically turned away at the gate.

Mr. DG, it would seem that your mission, apart from making me suffer, is to find some non-existent legal basis for it. How else can you understand, according to what I've been told by the press, that the Special Prosecutor explains that I can receive my ungrouped visitors without obstruction - for some strange reason of Covid measures being maintained - and you, on your side, add a regulatory provision dating back to 1973 that the Constitutional Court declared contrary to the Constitution in 2023? And you're always letting me know that it's the PS that sets the rules for my detention; conditions that are just as alienating.

"Last but not least, last year you crossed the rubicon by banning all my lawyers from the prison. One of the wardens in charge at the time, a torturer in his own right, even justified this measure with a ridiculous argument out of nowhere: "you've already been convicted, haven't you?" Which is, of course, a denial of the code of criminal procedure, very distressing for an officer in charge of running a prison.

I have had the honor of being Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice. I have never instructed any prosecutor, magistrate or prison official to deprive anyone of their rights, whatever the charges brought against them. On the contrary, in the course of my duties, I have always devoted my energies to ensuring that the necessary distance is maintained to ensure that justice is always done, without regard to the interests of the position I held. My friend and former colleague, the Garde des Sceaux Victor Topanou, has testified to this several times in certain circles. He and I were confronted with a case in government, where I stood my ground, despite the consequences I was potentially exposing myself to.

For a long time, my councils and I have been silent about numerous exactions because, Mr. DG APB, you have this annoying tendency to let injustice appear to be corrected by extending it rather momentarily, as I had to point out earlier. Each time your iniquities are revealed in the public arena, instead of correcting them by being fair, you identify scapegoats to divert attention from my flagrant case.

This is just a sample of the torment I endure at your hands. Surely, to remain silent would be to be complicit in my own destruction.

My Lieutenant-Colonel François Hounkpè, promoted to this honorable rank in 2023 for good and loyal abuse, I leave these traces for posterity, for your children, mine and the children of Benin in general. The role of administering degrading treatment that you accept should no longer be possible in our country since 1990. I denounce it so that no one suffers it tomorrow, not even those who subject me to it today.

You, your sponsors and accomplices will be held personally responsible for anything that may happen to my physical and mental integrity.

"Even in the tomb Jesus is Lord. My soul blesses Him abundantly. So focus on the hope that Easter brings, a message of resurrection, love and peace for all! Happy Easter to those of you who still have the chance to enjoy your rights.

Reckya Madougou

#ArbitraryDetention

#DiscriminationPrisonsBenin

#AllExpire

#LovingUsLiving