Southern African Development Community

Many SADC countries host foreign offenders in their prisons. One of the measures adopted by these countries to deal with this challenge is to transfer the foreign offenders to serve part(s) of their sentences in their respective countries. This has been achieved through enacting domestic legislation on the transfer of offenders and signing bilateral and, to a small extent, multilateral prisoner transfer agreements. In August 2019, the “SADC Protocol on the Inter-State Transfer of Sentenced Offenders” (the Protocol) was adopted. The Preamble to the Protocol states that the underlying reason for the transfer is to “contribute towards the social reintegration” of the transferred offenders. As of the time of writing this article, the Protocol had not yet come into force. In this article, the author highlights some of the human rights issues that are likely to be contentious in the implementation or enforcement of the Protocol, especially in the light of the prisoner transfer legislation in different SADC countries. These issues are: grounds for transfer of foreign offenders (under this sub-theme, the author discusses the persons eligible for transfer, application for transfer and consent to transfer); enforcement of the sentence; pardon, amnesty, commutation of sentences and parole; cost of transfer; monitoring the enforcement of the sentence; access to information by the prisoner before the transfer and after the transfer.