What is the situation of women in prison in Luxembourg?

Standards of prison conditions for women in Luxembourg are “lower than that of men”, Ombudsman Claudine Konsbruck has said.

The comments came on Monday during a presentation on a report of Luxembourg’s detention facilities. The report shows that prison conditions “have improved” since the last report was published in 2018, according to Konsbruck.

But this “does not mean that they are not suboptimal”, she added.

Around 10% of prisoners in Luxembourg are women, according to the report, with 33 held at the Luxembourg Penitentiary Centre in Schuttrange around 10km east of the capital. Another seven women are held at the Givenich Penitentiary Centre near the German border. There is a third prison in Luxembourg in Sanem.

The report said there are challenges associated with the care of women in one block of the Luxembourg Penitentiary Centre – the country’s largest prison – due to unsuitable infrastructure and, consequently, the lack of separation between the different profiles of female inmates.

“The current infrastructure falls short of the standards applied to men,” the report said.

There are “efforts made to provide the majority of women prisoners with paid employment”, but “the tasks offered to women remain traditional and lacking in variety”, the report said, giving examples of washing, ironing and sewing.

“We would like the management to consider opening mixed workshops, where the women could work alongside the men,” Konsbruck said. “They are also interested in accessing sports facilities with the men, because there is a wider range of activities for them.”

The report also said that access to psychiatric care remains “particularly worrying” at the Luxembourg Penitentiary Centre and that women do not benefit from the same facilities as men.

(This article was originally published in Virgule, machine translated using AI and edited by Kate Oglesby.)