Joint letter on prison conditions and COVID-19
19/07/2021
Bangkok, Thailand
Dear Mr. Somsak,
We, the undersigned national and international human rights organizations, reiterate our calls for the Ministry of Justice to take urgent measures to address ongoing overcrowding and the COVID-19 crisis in prisons across the country.
In mid-April of 2020, during the early stages of the pandemic, we sent a joint letter to the Department of Corrections in which we expressed our gravest concern over the potentially disastrous impact of the pandemic on the prison population and prison staff in Thailand. One year later, COVID-19 cases surged in the Thailand’s prison system amid a new wave of virus transmissions that hit many parts of the country beginning in April 2021.