French jails dirty and dilapidated

France's prisons are dirty, overcrowded and rundown, Europe's leading human rights body said in a damning report released today.

The Council of Europe's criticisms of France's jail and judicial system dealt a fresh blow to Justice Minister Rachida Dati, who faces an open revolt by magistrates angry about her reform agenda and her abrasive personal style.

The Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, said French policies on detention and immigration risked undermining basic rights.

"Living conditions are still unacceptable for numerous detainees, who have to cope with overcrowding, lack of privacy, dilapidated facilities and substandard hygiene," said Hammarberg, a former head of the Save the Children charity.

In his report he also sounded the alarm over prison suicides, with almost 100 detainees taking their life in French jails so far this year.

"The high level of suicides in French prisons is a symptom of structural deficiencies in the penitentiary system," he said.

French prison guards threatened to strike last month over their working conditions following the rash of suicides and Dati caused consternation in the ranks of the judiciary after she questioned the role of magistrates in one of the deaths.

Some 530 magistrates signed a petition on Wednesday demanding she apologise for the incident, piling further pressure on Dati, who was once viewed as the star of President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet but is now mired in controversy.

According to data released in October, France's prisons held a record 63,185 inmates in a system built to house 50,000.

Hammarberg said the reasons for this overpopulation lay "mainly in the tougher stance taken in criminal sentencing and by increasingly resorting to incarceration".

He also criticised a recent law championed by Dati which allows convicts to be held in prison indefinitely if experts believed they posed a danger to society, even after their official jail term expired.

"The definition of danger...is not a clear legal or scientific concept," he said.

Hammarberg also criticised France for setting quotas for the number of illegal immigrants to be expelled each year. Sarkozy has called for 26,000 immigrants to be sent home in 2008.

"Migrants are not numbers and even those without permit have human rights. Many of them have contributed to the development of the country and they do deserve a humane treatment," the Council of Europe report said.

Dati, the daughter of poor north African immigrants, is not responsible for France's immigration policy but is in charge of the prison system and her critics leapt on Hammarberg's report.

The main magistrates union urged Dati in a statement to act on the Council of Europe recommendations.

"France is going in the exact opposite direction," it added.