Mauritius: Why is it so hard to get convictions for police brutality?

The US State Department in its 2022 report on Human Rights has pointed to the lack of prosecutions for human rights violations leading to a culture of impunity within the Mauritian police force. So why is it so hard to put bad cops behind bars in cases of police brutality?

The political problem

The US State Department’s 2022 report on Human Rights points to the fact that “dismissals or prosecutions were rare” against Mauritian police officers when it came to brutality and human rights violations, which has contributed to making “impunity a problem” within the Mauritian police. This is not just a US view – in 2021, a UN human rights report also argued that “impunity was a significant problem for police and investigations involving officers often continued for years”. This is also a view echoed by the legal profession within the country. Jean Claude Bibi, a lawyer experienced in handling police brutality cases, tells l’express: “Convictions are rather few in relation to the amount of complaints received. They are just minimal.” So, why does Mauritius have such a bad record to putting bad cops behind bars?

In many ways this is also a problem of Mauritian politics. “Since the mid-1980s, all opposition parties have criticised governments over law and order, goading governments into embracing more repressive laws and powers to the police,” recalls Rajni Lallah of Lalit, which has maintained a database of 72 deaths in police custody since 1976. This tendency culminated in a more muscular form of policing that emerged in the early 2000s and was epitomized by the head of the MCIT in Curepipe, Prem Radhooa. His brand of policing entranced both politicians and the public at the time, until his police unit began extending its brutality from the poor that were traditionally the target to brutal policing to more well-to-do sections of the public. Many of whom took the police to court and won damages. The police itself was under no illusions about the price that such policing entailed: by the time of Radhooa’s exit from the force, even the police commissioner at the time Ramanooj Gopalsingh did not hesitate to point out that there were over 50 unresolved cases of police brutality against Radhooa.

The darker side of the shiny public image. “The political attitude has not changed all that much since then,” says Lallah, “we do not see calls from the government to end police brutality, the police continue to believe their job is to extract confessions and there is just no political will to deal with this issue.” Since the 1999 riots sparked by Kaya’s death in police custody and the emergence of the darker details of Radhooa’s legacy, political parties have paid lip service to policing reform but have done little. In 2013 the Labour-PMSD government introduced a Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Bill in parliament but did not push it through. The succeeding MSM-led governments have promised since 2015 to come up with their version of reform – the Police and Criminal Justice (PAJCA) Bill – but that too has yet to see the light of day.

The institutional problem

While successive governments have been wary about pushing for reform of the police itself, they have remained content with creating – and recreating – institutions that have proved ineffective in tackling police abuses. In 1998, the Complaints Investigation Bureau (CIB), headquartered in Rose Hill, was set up within the police to handle complaints against the police. But by July 2013, it was closed down over a lack of public faith in the police being expected to investigate their own colleagues. Instead, it would be the Police Complaints Division (PCD) of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) set up in June 2014 that would take over that job. The CIB simply handed over its backlog of 893 complaints to the NHRC.

But the NHRC had a problem: even in cases of police brutality by the law it had to start with attempting conciliation first. “This was done without lawyers and the police officers involved were not cross-examined. In many cases if you had a client complaining of abuse at the hands of the police and went to the NHRC they would simply go there and then come out having withdrawn their case. There was a lot of opacity around how that functioned,” says Bibi, “if any member of the public were to hit or kick somebody, that would be a criminal offence, so why would it be a matter for conciliation if a policeman did it?”

The limitations of the NHRC were not lost on the institution itself: in its first report since the PCD was opened in 2014, the NHRC pleaded for more powers to take effective action against police officers guilty of brutality or abuse. By forcing the NHRC to rely on the commissioner of police to discipline bad apples within the force, all that had been done was recreate the very same problem – police acting against police – that had undermined the previous CIB system. But instead of getting more powers, the NHRC’s PCD just got weaker: in 2016, it had six investigating officers, but in 2018, it just had two.

Out of the 541 complaints of police brutality that it got, only one case – that of Iqbal Toofany – was sent to the DPP. In 2018 the NHRC’s PCD was replaced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). But the newly minted IPCC merely ended up re-creating the same problems of the NHRC. Like the NHRC, it pushes for conciliation, “this was part of the law setting up the complaints division at the NHRC as well as the IPCC. That is unacceptable,” says Lallah, “back in the day if the NHRC was asking for more powers, the situation has not changed. The IPCC does not have the means.”

In June 2022, the IPCC had a grand total of six investigating officers – the same number as the NHRC in its heyday – to investigate 507 complaints of assault by police officers that the IPCC had recorded by that time. And just like the CIB and the NHRC before it, the IPCC too has a bad track record when it comes to resolving cases: by June 2022 out of 2,681 complaints the IPCC had received, 1,509 remained unresolved with no successful convictions of police officers accused of brutality or abuse. “In the past, if somebody from the police hit you, you could go to the nearest police station and record a complaint,” says Bibi, “now they just refuse to record complaints at the police station and ask you to do to the IPCC in Port Louis. I believe that refusal is illegal, but the police say it is practice. At the level of the IPCC, you lodge a complaint and then never hear about it for years. You had cases of alleged torture recently, there was a flurry of activity at the IPCC and then nothing. The IPCC has been very ineffective.”

Relying on the police to discipline its own has raised an obvious problem that the government’s auditors have long complained about: in its 2021-2022 report it pointed to 147 interdicted officers that although not on active duty were still being paid a total of Rs49.7 million, with one officer’s investigation lasting 12 years, regulations put in place in 2008, and instructions in 2015 and 2020 to speed up internal police investigations simply ignored. This ineffectiveness has not come without a cost: a June 2022 survey by Afro Barometer found that just 46 per cent of Mauritians trusted the police and 64 per cent said that the police used excessive force in dealing with alleged criminals.

The culture within

The inability to push through policing reform and keeping institutions such as the NHRC and the IPCC toothless has allowed a culture of impunity and silence to thrive within the police. This affects the few cases that do make it to Mauritian courts. The case of Ramdoolar Ramlogun became infamous in Mauritian legal history. He was picked up as a suspect in the murder of two sisters, Indira and Asha Jhurry, in January 2006. He died in police custody, with four police officers charged with being responsible for beating him to death at the Line Barracks detention centre. The case collapsed in court because Ramlogun was shuffled between more than 20 police officers from January 12 to 14, 2006 before he died with no one willing to testify as to which officers were responsible. In its judgement on March 16, 2016, all the Supreme Court could do was lament that “it is beyond dispute that Ramlogun was subjected to physical abuse and was killed whilst in police custody. Those responsible remain unpunished.”

More recently, there was the case of Neemye. He was picked up on January 2, 2009, from Tamarin after a brawl with his brother-in-law. Neemye ended up in hospital with 20 per cent of his body sustaining burns and his brother-in-law dying of his injuries. While in hospital, officers on duty had put shackles on his feet attaching him to his bed and leading him with chains to and from the bathroom in full public view until January 15, when his lawyer protested at the treatment. Although the police were willing to testify that such treatment was done “out of practice”, no one was willing to say which officer had ordered the shackles to be put on and off. “A disciplinary force should be able to ascertain who was responsible, committed acts, took decisions for the purposes of accountability. This accountability is one of several factors which leads to public confidence and credibility in an institution” the Supreme Court argued in a decision on October 21, 2022.