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Silenced in Prison, Repressed Outside: Damage Done by Political Imprisonment and “Civil Death” [1]
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Date: 2024-07
“When you leave the jail, the mark and the trace leave with you,” a Turkish academic told Freedom House. He was describing Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s campaign to crush dissent not just by jailing opponents, but also upending their lives on the outside with restrictions so many and so severe that they can no longer live normally.
This phenomenon is global. After or even in lieu of prison, undemocratic leaders are targeting journalists, opposition members, academics, and countless others with politicized detentions, political prosecutions that lead to imprisonment, and restrictions that severely disrupt their daily lives. For challenging abuses and rights violations, they’re being targeted with measures including asset seizures, close police monitoring, denial of state benefits, and controls on local, national, and international movement. Together, these efforts can inflict a condition experts call “civil death”: when undemocratic leaders smother opponents under layer upon layer of restrictions, in an attempt to erase them from society.
Visible and Invisible Bars, a report from Free Them All: The Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners, released today, draws attention both to political imprisonment and its damaging impacts on prisoners and their families, and the consequences of civil death. Worryingly, our research found that these tools are not limited to the most despotic of regimes. They can also emerge in increasingly authoritarian settings at times when democracy is eroding.
Repression through political imprisonment
While international condemnation of political imprisonment is usually directed at the most authoritarian regimes, its use can occur in less restrictive places where democracy is deteriorating. In Tunisia, for instance, which was rated Free in Freedom in the World as recently as 2020, a power grab by President Kaïs Saïed in 2021 spurred arrests of major political opponents, journalists, and lawyers, most of whom remain in pretrial detention on unfounded national security-related charges.
Surges in political imprisonment also accompany times of political tension, including elections and demonstrations. In Nicaragua, over 1,900 people were unlawfully detained in mid-2018 amid a violent crackdown on a protest movement; later, in 2021, dozens were imprisoned ahead of the presidential election, including candidates challenging incumbent president Daniel Ortega. Large protests in Venezuela starting in 2014 were also met with wide-scale violence, and thousands of people connected to antigovernment resistance were detained. In Tanzania, ahead of 2020 elections, political opponents were arrested and detained simply for campaigning against President John Magufuli and the long dominant Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party.
The impacts of political imprisonment are severe and long-lasting. In our research, experts, and several former political prisoners, told us about squalid conditions and serious violence in prisons. Families shoulder psychological burdens due to their loved one’s absence, and financial burdens from lost income and having to provide them with clothing and medicine that prisons don’t always supply. Loved ones have themselves become targets for harassment, politicized detention, and criminal charges as a means of further punishing the original target. Franz von Bergen, a Venezuelan journalist, shared with us: “Sometimes also I think that the regime likes that [former Venezuelan political prisoners and detainees] told their stories, because that also makes the fear grow.”
Repression through civil death
Release from physical confinement does not necessarily lead to the restoration of freedom.
Beyond bars, there lies a litany of civil death tactics used to harass, humiliate, and disrupt the lives of people fighting for human rights. We focused on four in particular: control over travel, physical monitoring, blacklisting, and control over assets. These measures can be attached to arrests, investigations, and conditions for release, implemented on their own, or imposed formally or through social pressure. Whatever the form, the aim is to make the lives of political dissenters and human rights defenders exceedingly difficult.
Travel bans are often imposed as a condition of release from detention, but not all restrictions are issued with notification. After Saïed’s power grab, dismissed parliamentarians and others learned from travel authorities at the airport that they were banned from leaving the country. Because they never received paperwork with formal notice, appealing the ban is nearly impossible. Travel controls can also be implemented during investigations: Tanzanian activists had passports confiscated while being questioned about their citizenship as a harassment tactic. Bans can also be informal: requirements that released political detainees report regularly to a police station, for instance, renders travel outside of a target’s home city incredibly challenging.
Blacklisting, both formal and through social stigmatization, and asset freezes or seizures also disrupt everyday life. In Turkey, after the 2016 attempted coup, over 100,000 public sector employees were fired from their jobs and barred from working in the public sector for perceived affiliation to the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ), the group held responsible by the government for the coup attempt. Many affected individuals fled the country to avoid further repression, while those who remained faced severe financial consequences, restrictions on travel, and social stigma. Nicaraguan political detainees, released under amnesty following the 2018 protests, were unable to return to university or find work; one woman “was not even allowed to do little jobs in their community. She went out to iron or to wash clothes…and the people who hired her told her she couldn’t do that anymore because she was a coup plotter,” a human rights defender explained to us.
Because many civil death targets still have charges against them, they also live under the ever-present threat that prison is only one wrong move away. Because of that psychological burden, plus the weight of restrictions that prevent normal participation in society, these journalists, dissidents, and activists often cease their work or even flee their country. The invisible chains of civil death thus allow repressive leaders to evade scrutiny by removing their most strident critics from society.
Securing unconditional freedom
Civil death, coupled with the more visible tactic of political imprisonment, are key instruments for authoritarian and undemocratic leaders to crush dissent. While the work to secure the unconditional release of political prisoners is a necessary step, democracy’s defenders should recognize that repression tactics go beyond outright imprisonment.
Our report concludes with a series of recommendations for governments and democracy’s defenders for how to fight political imprisonment and civil death. They should shine a light on the less visible tactics. They should also provide financial and psychosocial support for those experiencing the consequences of pretrial detention, imprisonment, and repression after their release. Countering political imprisonment and civil death, along with the conditions that enable their use in the first place, will also require a multilateral approach among democratic governments: they should support citizen-led social movements and local civil society groups doing essential work to free political prisoners and strengthen fundamental freedoms.
Only by calling out abuses, pressuring regimes that employ them, and supporting the brave individuals fighting on the front lines for democracy, can we hope to safeguard the freedoms we cherish and prevent the erosion of democratic rights.
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https://freedomhouse.org/article/silenced-prison-repressed-outside-damage-done-political-imprisonment-and-civil-death
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