Burundi hospitals lock up patients who can't pay

POSTED: 1337 GMT (2137 HKT), September 7, 2006
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BUJUMBURA, Burundi (AP) -- Patients are routinely detained in Burundi's hospitals, sometimes for months, if they cannot pay their bills, a human rights group said Thursday.

Health care for mothers and children under 5 is free in this central African country, which is emerging from 12 years of civil war and is one of the world's poorest countries. But other indigent patients often cannot pay bills, according New York-based Human Rights Watch.

"Detaining poor patients because they can't pay a bill punishes the poor and violates international human rights law," said Juliane Kippenberg of Human Rights Watch.

Jean Paul Nyarushatsi, an official in Burundi's Health Ministry, acknowledged that there have been such detentions, but he said the report "exaggerates."

"We used to have many such cases in the past, which is quite normal in a country in war as people get poorer," he said. "But four months ago, after the president declared free health care for children under 5 years and women giving birth, the number diminished more than 50 percent."

Burundi is emerging from a 12-year civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people, most of them civilians who died of disease and hunger. The war started in 1993, when Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu.

All of Burundi's main rebel groups from the majority Hutus have signed peace deals, leading to democratic elections last year that established a new government. Only the National Liberation Force opted out of the deals, but a peace deal was expected this week.

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