Burundi: Courts have 45 days to implement amnesty for 3,000 detainees

Bujumbura, Burundi (PANA) – The Burundian ministry of Justice has established a technical commission to scrutinise the dossiers of some 3,000 prisoners eligible for presidential pardon announced on 1 July during the 52nd anniversary of the country’s independence by president Pierre Nkurunziza.

Speaking on Saturday on Burundian national radio, the Burundian Justice minister, Pascal Barandagiye, said that the commission had received a 45-day mandate to visit the country’s prisons and establish the names of those who qualified for the amnesty.

The beneficiaries of the presidential pardon include those sentenced to less than six years' imprisonment, he said.

The other categories are pregnant or breast-feeding women, the elderly over 60 years, as well as all detainees who are suffering from untreatable diseases.

Barandagiye said death sentences would be reduced to 20 years' imprisonment.

Those sentenced for “breaching the state’s interior security" were not affected by the presidential pardon, the minister said.

The well-known prisoner and human rights activist, Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, will also not benefit from the amnesty.

Generally, the regime of president Nkurunziza had distinguished itself from the previous ones, over the past nine years, with mass releases of detainees, to clear the country’s most popular prisons, where hygiene and living conditions were“hard”, rights activists said.
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