Eight cases of death in Kosovo prisons

Florent Gashi, an information official at the Kosovo Correcting Service, told Radio Free Europe that prisoners who died within Kosovo prisons, mainly suffered from serious diseases.

Over the past two years, total eight people have died in Kosovo prisons. Death has come as a result of their disease. They were mainly suffering from serious diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases, and so on. Of these, only the last case, which occurred on Friday, June 14, is being investigated by competent organs. Other cases have been confirmed as suspicious death”, Gashi says.

The last case of a prisoner's death occurred last week at the correct Centre in Dubrava. He was born in 1992, a citizen of the Republic of Albania, and was charged with criminal work: purchase, ownership, distribution and unauthorized selling of narcotics.

The prisoner, with the recommendation of the doctor of the Dubrava Correct Centre, had been rushed to Peja Regional Hospital, but despite offering medical assistance has changed his life, the Kosovo Correcting Service has announced.

Representatives of the Council for Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms (KMDLNJ) speak of non-adequate medical services within Kosovo prisons. KMLDNJ Chairman Behxhet Shala tells Radio Europe free of charge that any death of prisoners in prisons is a concern and that the state must have a duty to protect their health.

We need to keep in mind that within a year in the correctional institutions, between 3,500 and 4,000 cases are spent, and this is a large number, and there are cases of up to four cases of prisoners dying in prisons. We need to remember that there are those who also have health problems and who get worse because they are all other circumstances in prison. Prison health services do not have the capacity that public service has, and if there is a comparison of what we have in public health, then it cannot have the prison health service creating more quality” services, Shala says.

Prisoners, Shala adds, sometimes also suffer from severe, incurable diseases, but there are also cases when they get sick during the suffering of the sentence.

He says that they have requested that because of lack of adequate medical services, those with an incurable disease and who are not able to provide adequate medical assistance not to be held in prisons, while others consider becoming better medical services.

We have remarks that within prisons there is no hospital capacity to deal with the most serious cases of disease, and then because of security they hesitate to send to hospitals outside the prisons. We have requested that a hospital be built at the level of Kosovo, where all persons deprived of freedom who need medical treatment and who would be completed with a professional framework”, Shala says.

One of the suspicious cases of death in prison was that of Astrit Dehar in August 2016. Vetevendosje's former activist, Astrit Dehari, has died while being held at the Prizren Pre- Hamiling Centre under suspicion of participating in the attack on the Kosovo Assembly building.

Astrit Dehar's family, but even the Vetevendosje Movement have disagreed with the findings of local institutions related to the case, which have argued that Dehar has committed suicide.

The family has sent super-expertosis to an institution in Switzerland. / REL