HUMAN RIGHTS OVERVIEW

Violence in Argentina’s overcrowded prisons worsened in 2005. Guard brutality, which has been especially well documented in Buenos Aires province, is widespread and shows no signs of diminishing.
Prosecutors continue to investigate the systematic violations of human rights committed under military rule (1976-1983). In June 2005, in an historic decision, the Supreme Court declared the “Full Stop” and “Due Obedience” laws to be unconstitutional, removing the remaining legal obstacles to these trials.

According to the Provincial Commission of Memory, a governmental body, three prisoners were killed every week in Buenos Aires province through March 2005, triple the level of violence in 2004. Prisoners in other provinces also suffer from overcrowding, deplorable conditions, and inmate violence. Eight people were killed, including five prisoners, two guards, and a police officer, in a prison riot in February 2005 in a prison in Córdoba province. Built to hold fewer than one thousand inmates, the prison was holding over 1,700 at the time. Two months later, thirteen inmates died in an inter-prisoner clash in the Instituto Correccional Modelo in the city of Coronda, Santa Fe province. According to official reports, eleven died of gunshot wounds, and two were burned alive.

A third deadly riot claimed thirty-two lives in October after a fire broke out in the Magdalena prison in Buenos Aires province. While the fire was started by clashing prisoners, some reports allege that fire extinguishers in the prison did not function and firefighters never entered the prison to battle the blaze.

The vast majority of inmates in Argentine prisons have not yet been tried. As of February 2005, only 11 percent of inmates in the province of Buenos Aires had been sentenced. Pretrial detention facilities are grossly inadequate. According to the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a respected human rights organization, 5,951 detainees in Buenos Aires province were being held in crowded police lockups in April 2005 for lack of regular prison accommodation.

In May 2005, the Supreme Court of Justice declared that all prisons in the country must abide by the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. The court was ruling on a collective habeas corpus petition lodged by CELS in 2001 on behalf people held in prisons and police lockups in Buenos Aires province. In August 2004 Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, and the World Organization against Torture presented an amicus curiae brief in support of the petition. In December 2004 the Supreme Court held a public hearing on the issue, the first ever in a human rights case, in which CELS, Human Rights Watch, and the provincial government of Buenos Aires participated. In addition to declaring the U.N. rules to be national minimum standards, the court required that police lockups be barred from detaining children under age eighteen or sick people.

Reference:
gs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/4/4/479
www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ AMR01/008/1996/en/dom-AMR010081996en.pdf -Páginas similares
http://www.hrw.org