The recently announced postponement of the opening of a detention centre for minors, as well as a ban on the use of mobile phones in the central prison were the key topics on the agenda of the meeting of the House legal affairs committee on Wednesday.
Committee member and Akel MP Andreas Pasiourtidis sharply criticised the central prisons administration and the government for its recent request to, for a second time, postpone the opening of a juvenile detention facility. The opening of the facility had initially been stipulated at the current migrant detention centre in Menoyia for January 1, 2026 and will now likely be delayed until the end of the upcoming year.
“It is a very serious issue, because both the law and European conventions require us to keep minors in a separate area from the central prisons,” Pasiourtidis said.
The Akel MP then went on to warn that prisons had been transformed into a “crime directorate”, saying court examinations had revealed that several crimes had been committed or organised from within the prison.
The committee then proceeded to discuss the bill to tighten penalties for using and bringing mobile phones into prisons.
He stressed that the relevant tightening of legislation did not need to be discussed if mobile phones had not been introduced into the prison in the first place, thus indirectly criticising the authorities.
Elam MP Sotiris Ioannou said that according to data received by the committee, the majority of prisoners under the age of 21 – 34 out of 39 – were foreigners.
“We are talking about a percentage of around 90 per cent. It is the established position of Elam that these people must finally be deported. It is not possible for those who come to our homeland and commit crimes not to be sent back to their own,” he said.
The government had last week announced the launch of a new system to combat the illegal use of mobile phones in the central prison.
Justice Minister Marios Hartsiotis had described the tool as a technically complex system, which was able to locate and deactivate the phones, referring to the measure as a response to a problem that had “persisted for more than a decade”.
