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This paper explores the health rights of prisoners as defined in international law, and the mechanisms that have been used to ensure the rights of persons in detention to realise the highest attainable standard of health. It examines this right as articulated within United Nations and regional human rights treaties, non‐binding or so‐called soft law instruments from international organisations and the jurisprudence of international human rights bodies. It explores the use of economic, social and cultural rights mechanisms, and those within civil and political rights, as they engage the right to health of prisoners, and identifies the minimum legal obligations of governments in order to remain compliant with human rights norms as defined within the international case law. In addressing these issues, this article adopts a holistic approach to the definition of the highest attainable standard of health. This includes a consideration of adequate standards of general medical care, including preventative health and mental health services. It also examines the question of environmental health, and those poor conditions of detention that may exacerbate health decline, disease transmission, mental illness or death. The paper examines the approach to prison health of the United Nations human rights system and its various monitoring bodies, as well as the regional human rights systems in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Based upon this analysis, the paper draws conclusions on the current fulfilment of the right to health of prisoners on an international scale, and proposes expanded mechanisms under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment to monitor and promote the health rights of prisoners at the international and domestic levels.

This article describes and clarifies the human rights of persons with disabilities in the context of detention in light of the recently adopted and already in force Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Convention). Focusing on the Convention, the article sheds light on the legality of certain forms of detention affecting persons with disabilities, the substantive and procedural requirements for their detention, and on their rights in relation to conditions of detention. This article also provides an account of the different treatments and practices inflicted on persons with disabilities in prisons and other institutions and assesses whether they constitute torture and ill treatment. The authors argue that the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities represents a paradigm shift that requires States to modify and adopt laws, policies and practices that fully respect the right to liberty of persons with disabilities, and their equal enjoyment of rights while in detention, including the right to be free from torture and ill treatment.

Indefinite immigration detention causes well-documented harms to mental health, and international condemnation and resistance leave it undisrupted. Health care is non-independent from immigration control, compromising clinical ethics. Attempts to establish protected, independent clinical review and subvert the system via advocacy and political engagement have had limited success.

The purpose of this study is to examine the following: how indefinite detention for deterrence (exemplified by Australia) injures asylum-seekers; how international legal authorities confirm Australia’s cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; how detention compromises health-care ethics and hurts health professionals; to weigh arguments for and against boycotting immigration detention; and to discover how health professionals might address these harms, achieving significant change.

Secondary data analyses and ethical argumentation were employed.

Australian Governments fully understand and accept policy-based injuries. They purposefully dispense cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and intend suffering that causes measurable harms for arriving asylum-seekers exercising their right under Australian law. Health professionals are ethically conflicted, not wanting to abandon patients yet constrained. Indefinite detention prevents them from alleviating sufferings and invites collusion, potentially strengthening harms; thwarts scientific inquiry and evidence-based interventions; and endangers their health whether they resist, leave or remain. Governments have primary responsibility for detained asylum-seekers’ health care. Health professional organisations should negotiate the minimum requirements for their members’ participation to ensure independence, and prevent conflicts of interest and inadvertent collaboration with and enabling systemic harms.

Australia’s aggressive approach may become normalised, without its illegality being determined. Health professional colleges uniting over conditions of participation would foreground ethics and pressure governments internationally over this contagious and inexcusable policy.

Health care practitioners in prison face the challenge of providing high standards of health care within the unique peculiarities and restraints of the prison environment. The strict adherence to principles of medical ethics by the prison health care staff and the knowledge and acceptance of these principles by the whole prison community not only results in ethical conduct but also yields practical professional advantages such as guidance in situations of conflict, promotion of confidence and avoidance of misunderstandings. The internationally consented conventions, declarations and recommendations relevant on medical ethics in prison are presented and their basic principles ‐ the primary task of the prison doctor, access to a doctor, equivalence of care, patient’s consent and confidentiality, preventive health care, humanitarian assistance, professional independence, professional competence ‐ are discussed. In addition, the personal obligation of the prison doctor for ethical reflection and decision making in individual ethical issues not covered by the quoted documents and in ethically controversial issues is emphasized. A training course and published guidelines for ethical conduct in prison health care are recommended.

Torture has been practiced for millennia, albeit the means, rationales, and objectives have changed. (For an extended discussion of torture's past, see Hajjar, 2009.) Starting in the 12th century, the rediscovery of Roman law in western Europe revived torture as an aspect of criminal legal processes, both ecclesiastical and secular. According to Edward Peters (1996, p. 41), “the inquisitorial procedure displaced the older accusatorial procedure. Instead of the confirmed and verified freeman's oath, confession was elevated to the top of the hierarchy of proofs…[T]he place of confession in legal procedure…explains the reappearance of torture in medieval and early modern law.”

The intersection between drug control and the death penalty represents a key nexus for human rights and drug reform advocacy and constitutes one of the most visible examples of the link between abusive law enforcement and drug control in the current period. The issue has emerged as a flashpoint of international debates on drugs and is one that raises important questions and challenges for both ‘abolitionist’ countries that oppose the death penalty and ‘retentionist’ States that continue to execute people. The death penalty for drug offences cannot be dismissed as simply an internal matter for States. Not only do executions for drug offences violate significant international human rights legal protections, domestic capital punishment laws in many cases cannot be separated from the influence of the international drug control treaty regime. This chapter will explore the question of the death penalty for drug offences and the challenges it presents for the international drug control regime more broadly.¹

This chapter explores the proposition that Australia’s abusive treatment of refugees and asylum seekers can be traced back to a denial of the foundational violence of colonisation.

By adopting a psychoanalytic frame, the research explores three questions: is Australia engaging in cruel, degrading and humiliating treatment of asylum seekers, a treatment that devolves into torture? If so, how is this operationalised? And finally what does the abuse satisfy within the state?

The work uses Freud’s paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and Melanie Klein’s work on the paranoid/schizoid position to describe the psycho-affective terrain from which this abuse emanates.

The chapter takes this psycho-affective terrain as the foundation and then investigates the impact the privatised detention regime has had in enabling the known/unknowability of the abuse and mechanisms at work within media practice to create ‘torturable subjects’ (Mendiola, 2014, p. 13).

The struggle against torture and institutional violence has to be practiced in numerous scenarios: in the very places of deprivation of liberty, against workers, administrations and judges who try to hide it or justify it, but also, it’s a struggle against an academy that, too often, has decided to look the other way. In order to be activist, criminology must leave the classroom and enter the places of deprivation of liberty. It must engage with victims and survivors and it has to make political and social denunciations, organising itself and weaving networks with other social organisations that fight for the same goal. Unfortunately, it also has to fight against the very obstacles that the criminal justice system institutions pose; the denunciations and persecution of these same institutions and some police and prison workers groups and unions; the dirty war against terrorism and political dissent; and the criminalisation of some mass media and also of the academic world, where activism against this phenomenon is a minority and marginalised. These two sides of the same coin, involvement in anti-torture activist movements, as well as persecution and criminalisation when challenging state power, is what the authors of this chapter have experienced in Catalonia and Spain. While we fight against torture outside the classroom, we also carry out activism inside the classroom, teaching what other academics do not want to engage with, and pointing out the political elements of criminology and the action of the penal system. In this chapter, the authors highlight the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in custody and prison, and in the context of police activity in Spain. Then, the authors explain the structures of denial (political, judicial and academic) that allow its perpetuation and impunity. The text ends with a journey through the configuration of activist criminology in Spain that unites critical analysis from a legal sociology perspective with collective and activist intervention.

The first case of COVID-19 in the Malawi prison system was reported in July 2020. Human rights organisations raised concerns about the possibility of significant COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths in the prison system, because of the poor infrastructure, lack of healthcare and adequate COVID-19 mitigation measures, existing co-morbidities (tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis C), malnutrition and poor health of many prisoners.

The authors conducted a legal-realist assessment of the Malawian prison system response to COVID-19 during state disaster measures, with a specific focus on the right to health and standards of healthcare as mandated in international, African and domestic law.

The Malawi prison system was relatively successful in preventing serious COVID-19 outbreaks in its prisons, despite the lack of resources and the ad hoc reactive approach adopted. Whilst the Malawi national COVID plan was aligned to international and regional protocols, the combination of infrastructural deficits (clinical staff and medical provisions) and poor conditions of detention (congestion, lack of ventilation, hygiene and sanitation) were conducive to poor health and the spread of communicable disease. The state of disaster declared by the Malawi Government and visitation restrictions at prisons worsened prison conditions for those working and living there.

In sub-Saharan Africa, there is limited capacity of prisons to adequately respond to COVID-19. This is the first legal-realist assessment of the Malawian prison system approach to tackling COVID-19, and it contributes to a growing evidence of human rights-based investigations into COVID-19 responses in African prisons (Ethiopia, South Africa and Zimbabwe).

This paper challenges and expands commonplace assumptions about problems of time and temporality in emergencies. In traditional emergency powers theory “emergency time” is predominantly an “exceptional time.” The problem is that there is “no time” and the solution is limited “in time”: exceptional behavior is allowed for a special time only, until the emergency is over, or according to formal sunset clauses. But what is characteristic of many emergencies is not the problem of “no time” but the ways in which time is legally structured and framed to handle them. Using the Israeli High Court of Justice 1999 decision on the use of physical interrogation methods under conditions of necessity, this paper illustrates how legally significant emergency-time structures that lay beyond the problematic of exceptional time, gravely implicate the way that “exceptional measures” are practiced and regularized.