What Abucha exposes about Maldives parole

Abdulla Ibrahim, better known as Abucha, was arrested in 2020 after an operation seized more than 90 kilograms of drugs. He eventually received an effective prison sentence of 25 years. By the beginning of this month, after spending about six years in custody, he was back outside on parole. Days later, he was back in prison.

The government says the Parole Board released him unlawfully. President Dr Mohamed Muizzu subsequently removed six members who had approved Abucha’s release.

At first glance, this looks like one questionable decision involving one notorious drug trafficker. It is more than that.

The scandal is not merely that Abucha was released. It is that the Maldives has repeatedly allowed executive and administrative discretion to alter how court-imposed sentences are actually served, whether through parole, medical release or presidential clemency, without a consistent system of reasons, review and public accountability.

Under President Abdulla Yameen, a convicted drug trafficker was allowed overseas through a medical-release process later criticised by the Anti-Corruption Commission, while another figure from the same network received clemency. Under President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, Ahmed Adeeb’s 20-year sentence was dramatically shortened. Under Muizzu, Abucha was released on parole through a decision the government now says was unlawful.

Parole is conditional release, not acquittal, pardon or cancellation of a sentence. Prisoners released on parole remain subject to conditions and can be returned to prison if they breach them.

That is neither unusual nor inherently soft on crime. Most fixed-term prisoners will eventually return to society. Properly administered parole allows that return to be supervised.

But there is an important distinction between becoming legally eligible for parole and being suitable for release. Reaching the minimum period does not automatically create a right to leave prison. The Board must still consider rehabilitation, prison conduct, drug use, the risk posed to the public, the release plan and whether the prisoner can reasonably be expected to live lawfully in the community.

That distinction appears central to what went wrong with Abucha.

Abucha was arrested in October 2020 after the seizure of 98.6 kilograms of narcotics. He was ultimately sentenced after a plea agreement, with reporting describing his effective sentence as 25 years.

Homeland Security Minister Ali Ihusaan said this week that Abucha had received three sentences of 12 years and six months and that parole eligibility for the relevant serious drug offence required him to serve six years and three months, half of the applicable sentence.

The Parole Board apparently calculated it differently. About four years spent in detention before sentencing had already been deducted when the sentence was imposed.

According to Ihusaan, the Board then treated the remaining period as the sentence from which the parole threshold should be calculated. In effect, time already credited once was used again in a calculation that benefited Abucha.

Ihusaan said that was contrary to the law. At the time Abucha was released, he had spent about five years and 11 months in custody.

But his criticism went beyond arithmetic. He said the Board also failed to adequately consider Abucha’s conduct in prison, drug use and the danger his release might pose to society.

If the government’s account is correct, the failure was therefore twofold: the Board miscalculated eligibility and failed to properly assess suitability for release.

That question should be easy to answer. It is not.

The Parole Board is a statutory body established under the Prisons and Parole Act. The law provides for nine members drawn from specified institutions and professional fields, including education, health, the Attorney General’s Office, civil society, police, Corrections, an Islamic scholar, a doctor and a mental-health professional.

Reporting indicates that only eight members were serving when Abucha was released and six were subsequently removed.

There is no established convention that Parole Board members are supposed to be secret. When the Board was constituted under President Abdulla Yameen in 2014, its members were publicly identified. Under President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, Corrections again announced appointments. In 2021, it named new members, the institutions they represented and the chair and vice-chair.

Yet information identifying the Board that decided Abucha’s application was not readily available before the controversy. No comparable President’s Office announcement identifying the current Board could be located, and Ihusaan has expressly declined to identify the six members removed.

His explanation was not that the law requires anonymity. He said there was no indication that they had deliberately acted improperly.

That is an unusual justification for secrecy. Whether an official acted intentionally, negligently or correctly has little connection to whether the public should know who held the statutory office.

There are legitimate reasons to protect medical records, psychiatric reports, victim information and intelligence considered during parole proceedings. The identities of public decision-makers are different. Confidentiality can protect sensitive information without concealing who exercised the power.

The President’s Office routinely announces appointments to other statutory bodies by name. Why should a body deciding whether convicted prisoners remain incarcerated be treated differently?

Once the ministry learned of Abucha’s release, Ihusaan said he instructed the Parole Board to reconsider the decision. The Board did so and revoked parole. Abucha was returned to custody on 6 October.

There may well have been an obvious legal error requiring urgent correction. But if the Parole Board exists to exercise statutory judgment, what is the legal mechanism by which a minister directs it to reconsider an individual case?

That matters even if Abucha should never have been released. If a minister can compel reconsideration because a decision appears too lenient, the same power could later be used because a lawful release is politically inconvenient.

In Canada, the Parole Board operates as an independent administrative tribunal at arm’s length from government.

The principle is straightforward. Parole should be a structured, evidence-based legal decision, not an act of generosity or an additional punishment imposed by political preference.

Ihusaan has also said that granting parole to major drug traffickers is contrary to the present government’s policy.

That may be politically popular, but government policy cannot replace legislation. If Parliament has enacted a law under which a prisoner can become eligible for parole after meeting specified conditions, an administration cannot substitute an unwritten policy that such prisoners should never receive it.

The proper course is to amend the law prospectively. Recent amendments have tightened the law for serious drug-trafficking offences, but applying a later policy to conduct governed by an earlier legal regime raises questions of retrospectivity.

This distinction protects both sides. It prevents a Parole Board from releasing someone merely because its members want to, but it also prevents the government from keeping someone imprisoned merely because a minister dislikes the offender or offence.

The rule of law matters most when its protection extends to someone the public has little sympathy for.

The problem of questionable departures from court-imposed sentences did not begin with this government.

Under President Abdulla Yameen, convicted drug trafficker Ibrahim Shafaz Abdul Razzaq was allowed to leave prison for medical treatment in Sri Lanka in February 2014, only months after receiving an 18-year sentence for drug trafficking.

Shafaz failed to return when the authorised period expired and was later apprehended in Colombo and brought back to Maldives.

The Anti-Corruption Commission later recommended charges against six senior officials, concluding that officials had abused their authority in arranging his temporary release. Among the concerns was whether Shafaz actually required urgent treatment unavailable in Maldives.

His eventual release from the sentence was separate. The High Court later overturned his conviction for insufficient evidence. The relevant controversy is the earlier administrative process that allowed a convicted drug trafficker to leave the country while serving his sentence.

A year later, Yameen used his clemency powers to pardon Ismail Shaheem, who was serving a 10-year sentence arising from the same major drug network. Shaheem was reportedly met outside Maafushi prison by ruling-party MP Ibrahim Shujau and Shafaz himself. Another drug offender, Ilyas Fuad, serving a six-year sentence, was pardoned at the same time.

These were not parole cases. Shafaz involved medical release, while Shaheem and Fuad involved presidential clemency. That distinction matters. But each mechanism can substantially alter the practical effect of a sentence, which is why each requires safeguards and scrutiny.

The same institutional question arose under President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih through another mechanism.

Ahmed Adeeb’s case was not parole. On 13 November 2023, four days before Solih left office, the President used his clemency powers to commute or pardon the custodial sentences of Adeeb and former MMPRC managing director Abdulla Ziyath.

Adeeb walked free after serving only a small portion of his 20-year sentence in conventional imprisonment.

Transparency Maldives described the pardons as an abuse of clemency powers and an example of impunity for politically powerful figures. The Human Rights Commission said the decision contradicted the administration’s stated zero-tolerance approach to corruption.

Then-Prosecutor General Hussain Shameem identified a deeper problem. The Prosecutor General had no formal role in the clemency process, while the law allowed extremely broad presidential discretion over sentence reduction.

Solih has since defended the Adeeb decision as lawful and said medical reports and other assessments had been considered. But legality alone does not answer the concern. A law can itself confer excessive discretion.

The issue was therefore not simply whether Solih possessed the legal power to grant clemency, but whether that power was exercised in the public interest after his administration had failed to deliver much of the accountability and recovery it promised.

There are good reasons for states to retain clemency powers. Wrongful convictions occur, sentencing laws can produce injustice, prisoners become terminally ill and humanitarian situations arise that legislation cannot anticipate perfectly.

But mercy loses legitimacy when the public cannot understand why one prisoner receives it and another does not.

What links these cases is the institutional weakness they expose: after a court imposes a sentence, enormous discretion remains over how it is actually served.

The Maldives’ parole machinery has previously failed in almost the opposite way.

When the Board appeared before Parliament in 2021, it admitted that 15 meetings had been cancelled in the preceding year because the five members needed for quorum could not be assembled.

Members explained that Parole Board work was an additional responsibility on top of their senior government jobs. The consequence was obvious: prisoners who might qualify for parole remained incarcerated because the body responsible for deciding their applications could not meet.

The Board had disclosed another structural problem in 2019. Roughly half of applicants being tested were positive for drugs, while many prisoners seeking parole had not completed drug rehabilitation because programmes were simply unavailable to everyone who needed them.

A Board cannot responsibly release prisoners who remain unrehabilitated and dangerous. But if the prison system itself fails to provide the rehabilitation required for release, a prisoner can become trapped by a condition the state has made impossible to satisfy.

Other parole systems show that confidentiality does not require institutional secrecy.

Canada publishes parole decisions and reasons subject to redaction. England and Wales allows members of the public to obtain decision summaries and, in appropriate cases, hearings can be public. New Zealand provides reasons to offenders and victims and permits access to decisions through information laws.

The lesson is not that Maldives must copy any one system. It is that sensitive information can remain protected while decision-making itself remains accountable.

At minimum, the public should know who sits on the Parole Board, their qualifications, when they were appointed and whether any seats are vacant.

Serious parole decisions should carry redacted reasons, information about rehabilitation and risk, and the release plan considered by the Board. There should also be a clear statutory appeal or review mechanism rather than ad hoc ministerial intervention, along with annual statistics on applications, approvals, refusals, breaches, recalls and reoffending.

Where a President substantially reduces a major criminal sentence, a written public explanation should identify the legal provision used and the broad grounds relied upon.

Abucha’s case cannot be fixed simply by dismissing six unnamed officials. If his release was unlawful, it required correction. But the reversal does not explain how the decision was made, why the safeguards failed or what prevents the same thing happening again.

Shafaz, Shaheem, Adeeb and Abucha arose through different legal mechanisms under different governments. Taken together, they show how much can happen to a sentence after the courtroom doors close.

Parole, medical release and clemency all have legitimate roles in criminal justice. They cannot become parallel routes through which court-imposed punishment is altered without meaningful scrutiny.

If the state changes a sentence imposed in open court, it should be prepared to explain with equal clarity who made the decision, under what law, on what evidence and why.

Column By Saif Fathih

Saif Fathih is a columnist at the Maldives Independent and a former member of the Malé City Council for Galolhu North. With his educational background in communications, international studies and public policy, he previously worked as a journalist, editor and public policy advisor, with roles including senior policy director at the ministry of national planning and editor of Ocean Weekly Magazine. Saif began his career as a radio producer and presenter at Minivan Radio, writer for Minivan Daily, and translator for the British High Commission and the European Union Mission to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. He is also the host of Ithuru Vaahaka, the Maldives Independent podcast.                           

All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the Maldives Independent. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to editorial@maldivesindependent.com.

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