Africa-Press – Angola. Angola has recorded 3,623 prisoners in excess of pre-trial detention by September this year, the deputy attorney general of the Republic, Elizete Paulo Francisco, said Wednesday, in Luanda.
Elizete Paulo Francisco, also national director of the Office of Judicial Inspection and Execution of Sentences, spoke at the opening of the Workshop “Deadlines for Preventive Detention, Execution of Sentences/Security Measures and Penitentiary Law.
He indicated that the cases recorded are distributed among three thousand and 136 pre-trial detainees with cases in the preparatory investigation phase and 487 judicial ones with documents already introduced in July in the courts.
In her intervention, the public magistrate noted that problems such as excessive preventive detention, expired sentences, lack of sentencing certificates, settlement of sentences, among other irregularities, are still part of the country’s judicial reality.
Such problems, he said, become more acute in relation to prisoners sentenced with a final and unappealable decision, due to the lack of implementation yet, despite the clear need for the courts or Sentence Execution Rooms provided for in the Code of Criminal Procedure and in the Law on the Organization and Functioning of Courts of Common Jurisdiction.
“What happens would take away from the sentencing courts the mission of controlling and dealing with dozens of situations that affect convicts in the execution phase of their sentences, including monitoring compliance with the sentence”, he stated.
He noted that this important court, he noted, “has caused possible engineering on the part of the operators of the justice system, with particular emphasis on the penitentiary service, which, by law, is the executor of deprivation of liberty measures”.
In turn, the general director of the Prison Service of the Ministry of the Interior, chief commissioner Bernardo Pereira do Amaral Gourgel, stated that the current context of the Criminal Justice System requires all judicial and public magistrates, jurists, prison system technicians, among others, redoubled commitment to legality.
“For this reason, continuous training is an indispensable instrument to ensure that our practices are aligned with the Constitution of the Republic of Angola, the law, international treaties ratified by our country and the principles of the Democratic State and the Rule of Law”, he highlighted.
The manager said that preventive detention, as a sanction measure, must be applied with rigor and respect for legal procedures, avoiding its transformation into an anticipation of sentence, constituting, according to the source, one of the main causes of overcrowding in penitentiary establishments, thus violating the guarantees of fundamental rights.
“Inadequate procedural speed and attribution of responsibility to the State are determining factors for the granting of hebeas corpus”, he concluded.
The Workshop, which takes place under the motto “Criminal Procedural Justice in the 50 Years of National Independence, Challenges and Perspectives”, is being co-organized by the Attorney General’s Office and the General Directorate of the Prison Service, and ends on Thursday (11).
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