Elisa Muñoz and her husband Joel who were killed by the police. (External source)
Santo Domingo.- The United States has released its 2021 annual human rights report on the Dominican Republic, in which it reiterates that practices that violate the rights of individuals continue to take place in the country.
The report mentions problems such as killings by state security forces; cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment by police and other government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary detention; arbitrary interference with privacy; criminal defamation of individual journalists; serious government corruption; and police violence against the LGBTI+ community.
It states that in some cases the Government took steps to prosecute and punish officials who committed human rights abuses or acts of corruption, but that inconsistent and ineffective application of the law sometimes led to impunity.
The report mentions that murders were committed by government agents, thus classifying the extrajudicial executions of civilians at the hands of police agents as a problem. The cases mentioned in the report include the deaths of Joel Díaz and Elizabeth Muñoz, killed by a police patrol on their way home from a religious event, and the case of architect Leslie Rosado.
In addition, it lists cases of torture, arbitrary arrests, the large number of people held in pretrial detention, that as of October of last year 59 % of the inmates in the old prison model were in pretrial detention and 62 % in the new one, lasting up to three years in some cases, says the report.
According to the report, the Government did not restrict or cut off Internet access, or censor online content, and there were no violations of academic freedoms and cultural events.
However, it does mention a violation of the freedom of peaceful assembly, which occurred on April 20 at the beginning of the abortion debate, when the police forcibly destroyed the tents of women’s rights activists who were camping in front of the National Palace. It adds that there was a violation of freedom of movement against people of Haitian origin.