Gabon: existing and surviving in prison

SOS Prisonniers Gabon. Short of living in the Libreville central prison to understand what daily life is like for an incarcerated person, one must imagine how nearly 4,000 people can live in a facility built for 300. Each space is shared by six to 10 incarcerated people. Those who cannot stand these close quarters sleep in the yard, directly on the concrete, which is often burning hot.
The meals are rudimentary: each person receives half a raw chicken leg and a chunk of bread per day. Then everyone must find their own solutions to cook the meat; otherwise, it is inedible. Drinking water is only available two or three days per week.
Uniforms are not provided to incarcerated people. Without help from their loved ones, they have nothing to wear.

If they fall ill, they have to wait for their health to seriously worsen if they hope to receive treatment from prison security’s nursing service.

SPG. The extremely high rate – which is indeed around 70% – of people in preventive detention is the symptom of a profound crisis within the judicial system and a direct cause of prison overcrowding. This figure can be attributed to an excessively slow criminal justice system due to a chronic shortage of means (judicial authorities, prison registrars) and the systematic use of detention warrants, including for minor offenses, due to a lack of suitable alternatives.

We frequently meet young people who have been imprisoned for reasons such as allegedly insulting people or theft, often without any tangible evidence being provided.

 These behaviours – often linked to socioeconomic factors – are criminalised without an effective scale for the penalties or recourse to alternatives to incarceration.

The penal code does, however, provide for several alternative sentences to imprisonment or financial penalties, such as community service, custodial or restrictive sentences of certain rights, or even sanctions and reparations. In practice, these are rarely, if ever, applied by the courts.

Several thousands of people without a definitive ruling against them experience inhumane conditions in prison. SOS Prisonniers Gabon ensures access to justice by offering legal assistance to people placed in preventive detention, helping secure a judgement within a reasonable timeframe. We also perform advocacy work with the authorities to demand a reduction in the recourse to preventive detention and the reform of the code of criminal procedure. Our role also consists of meticulously monitoring cases to raise the alarm over excessive detention.

SPG. For the first time in the history of our country, incarcerated people entitled to exercise their civic and political rights were able to participate in the electoral process by voting during the presidential election on 12 April 2025. Polling stations were set up in the prisons of the country’s nine provinces. We were present in several of them, as observers, to ensure voting went smoothly in the carceral environment.

It was a great victory for SOS Prisonniers Gabon and a major achievement for our democracy.

 Gabon is currently the only country in Central Africa that guarantees this fundamental right to incarcerated people. We nevertheless recognise that certain transparency conditions are not yet safeguarded and hope that this will be remedied before the next elections.

As for the new legislative body, we call for the creation of a parliamentary inquiry committee to look into the imprisonment conditions in the country’s prisons. Since independence, no such committee has been formed to monitor places of deprivation of liberty, even though Parliament has the full prerogatives to do so. In France, for example, considerable progress was observed following a similar initiative led by parliamentarians. It is time for the people’s elected representatives to establish an objective diagnosis of the carceral system so that we can, collectively, identify sustainable structural reforms. Our prison system could then make progress towards the standards set out in the Nelson Mandela Rules.

In the Fifth Republic, SOS Prisonniers Gabon expects, first, that new prisons will be constructed in compliance with the requirements of human dignity, the judicial system will take steps towards its own digitisation, the number of examining magistrates will increase and sentence enforcement courts will be established.

We also need to develop a national reintegration policy for formerly incarcerated people and foster greater cooperation between the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice and our organisation.