Chemgang Central Jail

Chemgang Central Jail, also commonly spelled Chamgang Central Jail, is a prison located in the hills southeast of Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. It is operated by the Prison Service Division of the Royal Bhutan Police, which sits under the Department of Law and Order. The facility is Bhutan's principal long-term detention site and is named in advocacy and United Nations reporting as the place where most of the country's long-serving political prisoners are held, in a wing referred to in those sources as the "anti-national" block.^[1]^[2]

The jail is the focus of one of the most contested information records in Bhutan. Independent reporting from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the Global Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners in Bhutan (GCRPPB), and the testimony of two former inmates released in 2023 and 2024 has produced a sustained, if interested, picture of conditions inside. Bhutanese state and quasi-official outlets — Kuensel, the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, and the Royal Government's own publications — have not, on the available public record, engaged with the substance of those allegations or with the most recent reported death in custody at the facility.

Location and operating authority

Chemgang lies a short drive from Thimphu in the Chang gewog area of Thimphu Dzongkhag. The site is part of a small cluster of state security and correctional installations south-east of the capital. The Prison Service Division of the Royal Bhutan Police operates all formal prisons in the country and lists Chemgang as a central jail rather than a district lockup or remand facility.^[3]

Routine administrative detail — built capacity, staffing, daily population, the layout of internal blocks — is not published by the Royal Bhutan Police. The most concrete official references to the site appear in occasional Bhutanese press items on overcrowding and on the planned shift of some convicted prisoners to open-air facilities such as the Yarju open-air prison in Wangdue Phodrang, which Kuensel has reported is intended to relieve pressure on Chemgang.^[4]

Political-prisoner population

The total population of Chemgang is not published. The portion of the population that draws sustained external attention is the long-term political-prisoner cohort, drawn predominantly from the Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa community and arrested in two main waves: the 1990–1994 demonstrations in southern Bhutan, and the 2008 arrests of returnees alleged by the state to be linked to the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist–Leninist–Maoist).

Human Rights Watch reported in January 2026 that approximately 21 of the around 30 known long-term political prisoners then held in Bhutan were detained at Chemgang in a wing reserved for those classified by the authorities as "anti-nationals" (ngolops). A smaller group of seven, several of them former Royal Bhutan Army soldiers from the Lhotshampa community, was held at the separate Rabuna Prison in Wangdue Phodrang.^[2] Earlier figures from Human Rights Watch and GCRPPB ranged from "at least 37" in 2023 to "32" in joint advocacy material in April 2025; the variation reflects releases, undocumented deaths, and definitional disagreement rather than a single authoritative count.^[5]

The named political prisoner most associated with the facility historically is Tek Nath Rizal, the former member of the Royal Advisory Council who was extradited from Nepal in 1989 and held at Chemgang until his release under royal amnesty in December 1999. His memoirs, including Torture Killing Me Softly and From Palace to Prison, are the longest first-person account of detention at the facility in the public record. Among prisoners reported as still held at Chemgang in advocacy and UN sources are Birkha Bahadur Chhetri, Kumar Gautam, and a man variously rendered as "Sunman Gurung" or "San Man Gurung", whose detention was the subject of Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion 60/2024.^[6]

Documented conditions

The most detailed external account of conditions inside Chemgang comes from two former prisoners: Madhukar Monger, released in August 2023 after roughly 29 years, and Ram Bahadur Rai, released on 5 July 2024 after 31 years and 10 months. Their testimony was recorded and published by Human Rights Watch in 2023 and 2024 and has since been corroborated in framing terms — though not independently verified inside the prison — by the joint communication issued by six United Nations Special Rapporteurs in April 2025.^[7]^[1]

Food rations

According to Monger and Rai, prisoner food rations were halved after the International Committee of the Red Cross stopped visiting Bhutanese prisons in 2012. The reported reductions, as relayed by Human Rights Watch, were from 20 kg to 12 kg of rice per month, from 6 kg to 1.5 kg of wheat flour, and from 3 kg to 2 kg of lentils. Both men told Human Rights Watch that prisoners routinely sold portions of their rations to police and prison guards in order to obtain medicines, soap, and clothing items the prison did not supply.^[7]^[1] The Royal Bhutan Police has not addressed these specific figures on the public record.

Medical access

Rai told Human Rights Watch that prisoners could wait up to eight months to see a doctor. In its January 2026 report, Human Rights Watch added that "simple medicines, such as paracetamol, are only provided to those who can pay for it". The same report describes a wider pattern of untreated illness among the long-term political-prisoner cohort, citing information that the United Nations Special Rapporteurs in April 2025 said lack of medical treatment "may have contributed to the death of two detainees" in Bhutanese custody before that date. The two unnamed detainees referenced in the April 2025 joint communication are not the same case as the December 2025 death of Sha Bahadur Gurung described below; their identities and the facility involved have not been publicly specified.^[2]^[8]

Bedding, clothing and winter

Rai's testimony to Human Rights Watch includes the claim that prisoners received "a blanket every three years and a mattress every 18 months", both reportedly of poor quality, with rice sacks reused as supplementary clothing and bedding. Issued clothes were described as "too small". In its 2025 and 2026 reporting, Human Rights Watch repeated the allegation that prisoners had "insufficient clothes or bedding for Bhutan's cold winters" — Chemgang sits at altitude near Thimphu and experiences sub-freezing winter temperatures.^[1]^[2]

Family contact and correspondence

Rai told Human Rights Watch that he had no contact with his family for the twelve years preceding his release, that letters sent by prisoners to relatives in the diaspora did not reach them, and that on his release he sent his children a photograph "so they can know what their father looks like". The Human Rights Watch UPR submission of April 2024 describes a near-complete prohibition on family contact for political prisoners whose relatives are outside Bhutan, the position in which most of the Lhotshampa political-prisoner families now find themselves.^[1]^[9]

Torture allegations

Rai's account includes specific allegations of torture before and during his trial in the 1990s, hospitalisation, and a return to the prison for further mistreatment, as well as injuries that he said had left him unable to write his own appeal. The Royal Government of Bhutan has not engaged the substance of these allegations on the public record. Tek Nath Rizal's memoirs of his 1989–1999 detention at Chemgang provide an earlier first-person account of torture in custody. These are first-person testimonies and have not been independently verified inside the facility.^[1]

International monitoring

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted periodic visits to Bhutanese prisons, including Chemgang, until 2012. According to Human Rights Watch, the visits ceased in that year. Neither the Royal Government of Bhutan nor the ICRC has, on the public record reviewed, set out the reasons for the cessation. The 2012 cut-off is the single most significant event in the international monitoring history of the facility, because it removed the only sustained external presence inside Chemgang and because subsequent reporting by Monger and Rai dates the worst documented deterioration in food rations to that year.^[1]

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has issued opinions on Bhutanese cases — Opinion 48/1994 and Revised Decision 3/1996 on Tek Nath Rizal, and Opinion 60/2024 on Birkha Bahadur Chhetri, Kumar Gautam and Sunman Gurung — but has not, on the public record, conducted an in-country visit. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has not been granted a country visit on any record located. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have not been granted independent prison access; their reporting rests on released-prisoner testimony, family accounts, and documentary review.^[6]^[8]

Deaths in custody

The most recent and most contested data point in the Chemgang record is the death of Sha Bahadur Gurung, reported as having occurred at the facility on 15 December 2025. Gurung, then aged 65, had been transferred to Chemgang from Rabuna Prison shortly before his death after approximately 35 years in detention. According to Human Rights Watch, summarising what the authorities are reported to have told the family, Gurung died "while undergoing treatment for an eye condition". Amnesty International, citing his family, attributed his death to "decades of abuse, sustained neglect of his health, and a delay in medical response after he was found unconscious", and described his treatment in custody as amounting to "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment". No independent post-mortem, inquest, or Royal Government of Bhutan public statement on the death has been located in the sources reviewed.^[2]^[10]

Separately, the joint communication issued by six United Nations Special Rapporteurs in April 2025 stated that lack of medical treatment for severely ill detainees "may have contributed to the death of two detainees" in Bhutanese custody. The communication did not name those two detainees or specify the facility. They are distinct from Gurung, whose death post-dates the communication by more than seven months. Whether they were held at Chemgang has not been publicly established.^[8]

Earlier deaths in custody at Chemgang are not systematically catalogued in publicly accessible sources. Tek Nath Rizal's memoirs and historical AHURA Bhutan documentation are likely to contain additional cases from the 1990s but have not been comprehensively reviewed for this article.

Official framing and information environment

The Royal Government of Bhutan's framing of the population at Chemgang is that they are convicted offenders held under the National Security Act of 1992 and the treason and sedition provisions of the 2004 Penal Code, who received fair trials and whose continued detention is a matter of domestic law enforcement. State-aligned terminology in Bhutanese sources refers to these prisoners as "anti-nationals" (ngolops), "security convicts", or, in older usage, "subversives". The advocacy framing, used by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, GCRPPB and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, is that the same individuals are political prisoners convicted in proceedings that did not meet international fair-trial standards and held under conditions amounting to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.^[1]^[6]

Bhutanese state and quasi-official outlets — Kuensel, the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, and Royal Government communications channels — have, on the publicly available record reviewed, not reported on Sha Bahadur Gurung's death, on Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion 60/2024, or on the April 2025 joint communication of the six United Nations Special Rapporteurs. The structural backdrop to that absence is a steep decline in Bhutanese press freedom: the country's Reporters Without Borders ranking fell from 33rd in 2022 to 152nd of 180 in 2025, and a 2025 survey of Bhutanese journalists reported that authorities frequently rejected information requests on security matters. Silence in the domestic media is patterned and consistent with the long-running non-coverage of the political-prisoner caseload, but the absence of online coverage is not by itself evidence of editorial suppression in any individual case.^[11]

Visiting and contact information

Operating authority: Prison Service Division, Royal Bhutan Police, Department of Law and Order, Royal Government of Bhutan.

Address: Chemgang, Chang gewog, Thimphu Dzongkhag, Bhutan. [Precise street-level address not publicly published — contribute if you have verified information.]

Phone / email: [Not publicly published. Enquiries are normally routed via Royal Bhutan Police headquarters in Thimphu.]

Official websites: Prison Service Division — Royal Bhutan Police

Family visit policy: Visit access for the long-term political-prisoner cohort is reported by released prisoners and their relatives to be heavily restricted, and to be effectively unavailable for prisoners whose immediate family lives outside Bhutan.

Independent monitoring: No regular external monitoring since the 2012 cessation of ICRC visits.

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