A/HRC/26/45 refusal of family leave for very long periods of time. Alleged or actual failure to execute tasks during national service is also severely punished. The disproportionate nature and the fact that such punishments constitute torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment are clear violations of human rights. Accordingly, national service conscripts live in constant fear; the threat of severe penalties, sometimes of a life-threatening nature, being part of their daily lives. 75. Conscripts are not free to leave national service before they have been officially demobilized. However, as already indicated, there is no comprehensive demobilization programme in Eritrea (see section IV.A.1 above) and many conscripts serve in the military for most of their working lives for a paltry salary. 76. Furthermore, the ILO Committee of Experts has already discussed whether Eritrean national service may constitute an exception to the definition of forced labour, as stipulated in ILO Convention No. 29.20 The Committee of Experts has examined the following exceptions under article 2, paragraph 2: compulsory military service for work of a purely military character; cases of emergency, including war and calamities, such as fire, flood or famine; and minor communal services performed by the members of the community in the direct interest of the community. For compulsory military service to be considered as an exception to forced labour, work imposed on conscripts has to be of purely military character. In order to make sure that, in practice, compulsory military service is not diverted from its objective, the ILO Committee of Experts has repeatedly requested the Government of Eritrea to indicate what guarantees are provided to ensure that services exacted under compulsory military service laws are used for purely military ends. The Committee of Experts has also considered that compulsory national service in Eritrea exceeds the limits of the exception provided for in article 2, paragraph 2 (d), of ILO Convention No. 29 relating to work imposed in cases of emergencies. In that respect, the ILO Committee of Experts has urged the Government to take the necessary measures, “both in law and in practice, to limit the exaction of compulsory work or services from the population to genuine cases of emergency, or force majeure, that is, to circumstances endangering the existence or the well-being of the whole or part of the population, and to ensure that the duration and extent of such compulsory work or services, as well as the purpose for which it is used, is limited to what is strictly required by the exigencies of the situation”. 21 Finally, the ILO Committee of Experts has pointed out that the existing large-scale and systematic practice of imposing compulsory labour on the population within the framework of the national service programme is also incompatible with ILO Abolition of Forced Labour Convention No. 105, which prohibits the use of forced or compulsory labour as a method of mobilizing and using labour for purposes of economic development.22 V. Incarceration 77. The Special Rapporteur continued to collect information on arrests and detention conditions, as these are inextricably linked to national service, given the high number of evaders and deserters and persons held in lieu of family members in Eritrea’s prisons. The Special Rapporteur was unable to obtain statistics pertaining to the prison population or to the accurate number of detention facilities. The non-availability of statistics relating to both 20 21 22 Article 2, paragraph 2, of the Convention refers to five types of work or service which, while amounting to “forced or compulsory labour” as defined in the Convention, are considered exceptions to forced labour. See ILO CEACR, Direct Request concerning the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), 2010, 5th para. Ibid. 15