Flooding impacts provincial prison

Severe flooding in Northwestern Cambodia has left Banteay Meanchey provincial prison under more than 70 centimetres of water and created increasingly worrisome humanitarian conditions at the facility, prison officials and rights workers said.

Thean Chhorvoan, acting director of Banteay Meanchey provincial prison, said floods hit the detention centre beginning last Saturday and had been rising ever since.

“On Tuesday, the water level rose to a half-metre, and as of Thursday, the level of water has risen to 70 centimetres, even though authorities have used four generators to pump out water from the prison around the clock,” Thean Chhorvoan said.

The area around the prison was also flooded, he added.

Thean Chhorvoan said yesterday that administrators had no immediate plans to evacuate inmates from the prison because they had succeeded for the time being in diverting the floodwaters from the prisoners’ sleeping area.

But Chea Sothea, a prison monitor for local rights group Licadho, said inmates were having trouble sleeping as water seeped into their quarters.

With the prison’s latrine flooded, she added, inmates had been forced to defecate in plastic bags, creating an extremely unsanitary environment that had led several prisoners to fall ill with diarrhea.