Penology

The European Court of Human Rights in a judgment on Thursday said Romania and Lithuania had violated the European prohibition on torture, and ordered them to pay 100,000 euros in damages each to two terrorism suspects who were detained and tortured in CIA jails in the countries.

The Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture on Thursday again criticised the treatment of inmates in Albania's Zaharia prison for psychiatric patients near Kruja as "inhuman and degrading".

Some inmates at New York City's biggest jail got a taste of ancient Greece this weekend.

The Paraskevopoulos law introduced to reduce overcrowding at the country's prisons is bad and has caused very big problems.

When it was drawn up it echoed the obsessions and fixations of its writers and was the product of pressure exerted by powerful interests both in and outside prisons.

The damage has certainly been done, but the time has come to limit it.

The Committee Against Torture of the Council of Europe presented a report on Bulgaria, which reported a slight improvement in the conditions in the places where convictions are served in Bulgaria.

Tatsuma Hirao, 27, who was serving time for multiple thefts, had been working at a shipbuilding yard at the Matsuyama prison in the southwestern city of Imabari.

But he gave guards the slip on Sunday night, disappearing from the facility he shared with around 20 other inmates.

According to Chief Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov, there are serious flaws in the security of the Penitentiary establishments. Therefore, he said, the most dangerous criminals should be concentrated in one prison that is technically secured, with a high level of security.

Once again a convict escaped from a Bulgarian prison. The 42-year-old Georgi, nicknamed Mandjata, has not returned to the Plovdiv prison after working on an outside site. He was sentenced to one year in prison for possession of drugs. He was serving his sentence in an open type prison dormitory. On the second day, he did not come back from the site he worked on.

At least 21 people died Tuesday in an attempted breakout from a prison in northern Brazil aided by an armed group on the outside trying to blow up a wall, officials said.

Prison wardens are considering reopening their protests and informing them in an open letter of the Prime Minister, the President of the National Assembly, the Justice Minister and the Chief Prosecutor.