Amnesty International on Wednesday urged the Lebanese authorities to prioritize prisoners’ health as deaths among the incarcerated population nearly doubled in 2022 compared to 2018, a year before the onset of the ongoing acute economic crisis.

The human rights watchdog called on the judicial authorities to conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into the deaths to determine the potential responsibility of prison officials, as well as prison conditions such as overcrowding.

“The sharp increase in custodial deaths must be a wake-up call to the Lebanese government that their prisons need urgent and drastic reform,” said Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, in a press release.

She underlined the urgent need to decongest prisons and commit additional resources to ensure people in prison are receiving adequate healthcare and have immediate access to emergency medical care.

“The economic crisis is no excuse for prison authorities to deny prisoners access to medication, shift the cost of paying for hospitalization to the families of prisoners or delay prisoners’ transfers to hospitals,” Majzoub added.

The Ministry of Interior provided no explanation of the causes of the rising deaths, said Amnesty International which had conducted an investigation on the subject, titled “Instead of Rehabilitation, He Found Death: Deaths in Cutody Doubled Amidst Four-year Economic Crisis“.

According to the probe, deaths increased from 14 in 2015 to 18 in 2018 and 34 in 2022.

Overcrowding in prisons has become particularly acute in recent years. Lebanese prisons are 323% over capacity, and around 80% of detainees are held pre-trial. The combination of overcrowding and dire detention conditions has led to the deterioration in the health of the prison population.

The real value of the Ministry of Interior’s budget for providing healthcare to people in prison decreased from 7.3 million US dollars in 2019 to around 628,000 US dollars in 2022.

As a result, prisons are not adequately staffed, and prison pharmacies lack basic medication such as painkillers and antibiotics.

Since the start of the economic crisis, the government has failed to pay hospitals bills related to the treatment of people in custody which has resulted in many hospitals refusing to admit patients from prison. According to the figures shared by the Ministry of Interior with Amnesty International, 846 people in custody were hospitalized in 2018 and only 107 in 2022.