AMMAN, 19 December 2006 — Jordan’s King Abdallah yesterday ordered the shutdown of the notorious desert Jafer prison, located 270 kilometers south of Amman, which was the main detention site for the regime’s political opponents over the past 50 years, an official statement said. The jail will be turned into a vocational training school, the statement added.
The monarch also ordered formulation of a strategy for “improving the infrastructure” of the rest of the country’s prisons following criticism by the National Center for Human Rights and world human rights organizations, the statement said.
Human rights activists as well as local and foreign NGOs, including NCHR, have demanded the shutdown of the Jafer prison because of “its poor services and evidence of human rights violations and torture.” UN Special Rapporteur Torture Manfred Nowak who issued a report on Jordanian prisons earlier this year, said the isolated desert penitentiary was a “punishment facility, where detainees were routinely beaten and subjected to corporal punishment, amounting to torture.” Head of the Public Security Directorate Lt. General Mohammad Eitan said that the prison would be closed today and inmates would be transferred to other prisons.
Meanwhile, the State Security Court has jailed an elderly Jordanian for eight months for belonging to the outlawed Islamist movement Hizb At-Tahrir, a judicial source said yesterday. Mahmud Saeed Jaber, 74, was sentenced to one year in jail but the presiding judge decided to take into account the four months he has already spent in jail because of his age and “in order to improve himself,” the judicial source said.
