Zamzam Ahmed Dualeh

Zamzam Ahmed Dualeh, aged 16, has finally returned to her native Puntland after spending five months in prison in Somaliland. Wrongly convicted of espionage and jailed for five years in a grossly unfair trial, she was pardoned and released into the care of the visiting UN Independent Expert on human rights in Somalia on 2 February. She left Somaliland the next day.

Zamzam Ahmed Dualeh was arrested in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, in August 2004. She was accused of spying for a supposed Islamist "terrorist" group in neighbouring Puntland, a regional state of Somalia, which had clashed with Somaliland over disputed border regions.

Denying the charges, she claimed that she had been raped and beaten by six police officers to make her confess. She said she was taken from her police cell and tortured at a secret location on several occasions. She identified some of the alleged rapists who were brought as prosecution witnesses. Her defence counsel was not allowed to see testimony by government doctors said to have assessed her rape allegations, nor to conduct a proper cross-examination. The judge summarily dismissed her rape and torture allegations.

Her four defence lawyers were jailed for three years for "insulting the judge" but were released shortly afterwards. Local human rights defenders who supported her were harassed and threatened, and some briefly arrested.

AI severely criticized the court's failure to investigate adequately her rape and torture allegations and called for an independent and impartial inquiry into them. If the allegations are substantiated, any police officer found to be responsible for rape should be tried in accordance with recognized standards of fair trial.

Zamzam Ahmed Dualeh should not have been tried in an adult court, since she was under the internationally-recognized age limit of 18 years, and she should not have been imprisoned with adults.

She was finally released through the intervention of the UN Independent Expert, Dr Ghanim Alnajjar. Under a negotiated arrangement to settle this much-criticized case, the Somaliland government also agreed to cooperate if she decided to make a court complaint against the authorities.

Dr Ghanim Alnajjar, UN Independent Expert for Somalia and founder-member of AI Kuwait c Private

Dr Alnajjar also held meetings about human rights issues with government officials and NGOs, including human rights defenders, both in the Somaliland Republic - whose self-declared independence since 1991 has not been internationally recognized - and in Puntland. In Kenya, where the Somalia peace and reconciliation conference concluded in late 2004, after nearly 14 years of state collapse and massive human rights abuses, he also met members of the new Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. He submits his fourth annual report to the UN Commission on Human Rights in April.