In an interview with Le Soleil, Professor Amsatou Sow Sidibé, president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), offers a frank assessment of the state of human rights in Senegal. She acknowledges significant progress on the legal and institutional fronts, while highlighting the persistent limitations in the effective implementation of reforms.

She focuses particularly on the period 2021-2024, described as a "painful interlude", marked by "loss of human life, physical violence, destruction of public and private property, restriction of space with repression of fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression, demonstration and association, with several arbitrary arrests in all directions, restrictions on the press, etc."

Moreover, the interviewee from the national daily newspaper emphasizes, "the 2024 amnesty law is also criticized for having been perceived by a part of the population and civil society as an obstacle to justice and to the reparation due to the victims."

In addition to prison overcrowding, the academic denounces "worrying" detention conditions where prison today seems to "destroy more than it repairs".

His diagnosis reveals "a promiscuity that promotes recidivism by bringing together hardened criminals and first-time offenders."

The first Senegalese woman to earn a doctorate in legal and political sciences and a candidate in her country's 2012 presidential election also highlighted the unsanitary conditions and inadequate access to medical care. "Overcrowding makes regular maintenance of the facilities, particularly sanitary facilities, difficult, exacerbating the risks of infections and diseases. Hygiene conditions are alarming. Added to this is insufficient access to medical care, with delays or a lack of appropriate treatment, the worsening of chronic illnesses, and a lack of health monitoring, all of which endanger the health of the detainees."

The president of the CNDH continued: "Other violations of fundamental rights that can be mentioned include, for example, the excessive use of pre-trial detention, often prolonged, sometimes through illegal practices such as returning the suspect to the prosecutor's office, which undermines the right to a fair trial and constitutes a denial of the most basic human rights."

To humanize the system, she advocates a five-pillar roadmap: the use of alternatives to detention, the acceleration of procedures to reduce preventive detentions, the construction of modern prison infrastructure, the strengthening of resources and staff training, and a massive investment in social reintegration to break the cycle of recidivism.