A monitoring sweep of 14 Freetown police stations found 555 suspects in custody, 254 held beyond constitutional limits, 393 with no lawyer, and zero people charged at the unit handling the country’s most serious crimes. CHRDI says the rule of law is in crisis.
On two days in April, the 21st and the 23rd, monitors from the Campaign for Human Rights and Development International walked into 14 police stations across Freetown’s Western Urban Area and began counting. What they found, and have now documented in a formal monitoring report, amounts to a systemic indictment of Sierra Leone’s justice system at its most basic point of entry: the police cell.
Of the 555 suspects interviewed, 522 men and 33 women, only 31 had been charged in court or released on bail by the time monitors arrived. That is 5.6 percent. The remaining 94.4 percent were simply sitting in detention, waiting for a system to process them that, by the evidence of this report, is barely functioning.
At the Criminal Investigations Department, the unit responsible for the country’s most serious cases, the numbers are even more stark. Fifty-seven suspects were being held beyond legal time limits. Not one had been charged during the monitoring period.
Two hundred and fifty-four suspects across the 14 stations were being held beyond the constitutional time limits that exist precisely to prevent this kind of detention. Three hundred and ninety-three had no legal representation whatsoever. The CID recorded the highest number of unrepresented suspects, followed by Eastern Police and Calaba Town stations that between them hold some of the most vulnerable people in Freetown’s justice pipeline.
The physical conditions inside those cells compound the legal failure. Suspects sleep on bare concrete floors, on plastic sheets, or on flattened cardboard. There is no state-provided bedding. There is often no state-provided food either police officers, according to the report, are funding meals and basic administrative costs from their own salaries, an arrangement that reflects not individual generosity but institutional abandonment. Drinking water is stored in plastic bottles and runs shortest on Sundays, when the administrative machinery of the justice system is at its quietest and the people locked inside are most forgotten.
Youth between the ages of 18 and 35 make up the largest proportion of those detained, with Kissy and Ross Road stations recording the highest concentrations. But the detail that cuts sharpest is this: at Congo Cross and Lumley police stations, monitors found minors held inside adult cells a direct violation of international child protection standards and a failure that no authority in Freetown can claim ignorance of.
CHRDI’s report identifies several reasons for why suspects are accumulating in cells without being charged or released. Persistent power outages are disrupting the administrative processing of cases. Confusion among officers about the new Criminal Procedure Act legislation designed to modernise justice procedures is creating delays rather than efficiencies. And underneath those structural failures lies an allegation that corrodes what little public trust remains: that bail services are being monetised, with payments changing hands for releases that should be free and unconditional under the law.
The compounding effect of all these failures is a holding pattern suspects arrested, placed in cells, and left there as the hours and days accumulate past the constitutional limits that are supposed to exist as a hard boundary between lawful detention and arbitrary imprisonment.
CHRDI’s Chief Executive did not reach for diplomatic language when addressing the findings. “These findings expose a justice system under severe strain,” he said. “When police officers fund food and administration from their own pockets, when suspects sleep on concrete, and when the unit handling serious crime charges zero people, the rule of law is in crisis.”
The crisis CHRDI has documented in April 2026 is not a new one it is a deepening of conditions that have been formally recorded by external observers for years. The 2023 and 2024 United States State Department Human Rights Reports both flagged Sierra Leone’s detention infrastructure as a serious concern. As of August 2023, Sierra Leone’s 21 prisons designed to hold 2,495 inmates were holding 5,561. The Freetown Male Correctional Centre, built for 324 people, held 1,820. Cells across the system lacked lighting, bedding, ventilation, and sanitation. Inmates slept on bare floors. Mosquito nets were banned on security grounds. Police holding cells were described as dark, cramped, and without adequate toilets or potable water. Minors were found alongside adults. Women were held with young children.
What the State Department’s reports captured in broad strokes, CHRDI’s April monitoring has now rendered in granular and undeniable detail station by station, number by number, name by name.
The report’s recommendations are urgent and specific. The organisation is calling on Sierra Leone’s authorities to immediately provide state-funded food, bedding, and cleaning supplies for all detention facilities; to guarantee free legal aid from the moment of arrest rather than the moment of charging; to end all payments associated with bail and administrative processing; to address the electrification failures that are disrupting case management; to issue clear guidance to officers on the Criminal Procedure Act; and to remove every minor currently held in an adult cell.
Each of those demands is, on paper, already a requirement of Sierra Leonean law or of international obligations the country has formally accepted. The gap between what is legally required and what CHRDI’s monitors found on those two April days is not a gap of intention. It is a gap of political will, of resource allocation, and of institutional accountability.
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Five hundred and fifty-five people were in those cells. Five hundred and twenty-four of them had not been charged. Many had no lawyer. Most were sleeping on concrete. Some were children.
The rule of law is not an abstraction. In Sierra Leone right now, it is a bare floor in a dark cell on a Sunday with no water.
