While there have been improvements in recent years, criminal justice policy in Central Asia remains punitive.
Some Central Asian countries have taken steps in recent years to reduce their prison populations and in the case of Kazakhstan has actually closed prisons, however, conditions in prisons remain poor and carry echoes of the Gulag regime left by the Soviet Union. They are also influenced by contemporary Russian prison systems, employing harsh punitive approaches to manage defendants and people in prison.
In some countries accessing information about prison populations can be challenging. In Turkmenistan, for example, prison statistics have not been updated for decades, and many people in prisons seem to ‘disappear’ and remain missing from official record.
The use of probation and alternatives to detention is fairly new across the region. In Uzbekistan the probation service was only formed in 2019, which was part of a larger programme to bring the country’ s criminal justice system in line with international standards so it is too new to discern its effectiveness at reducing the prison population or providing an effective alternative to detention.
PRI has been working in the Central Asia region since 2001. The Central Asia programme is based in Astana, Kazakhstan and we are also locally registered in Kyrgyzstan. We work in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Current priorities in the region are torture prevention, improving independent public oversight of places of detention, and supporting child-friendly justice systems.
Latest updates
Blog post
The over-penalisation of poverty through fines and fees
In many countries around the world, criminal justice fines disproportionately affect the poorest and most marginalised in society, effectively creating tiered justice systems. In this blog, Jean Galbraith and Rheem Brooks from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School summarise the findings of new research and discuss what international human rights and criminal justice communities […]
16th October 2023
Training
Trainer’s Manual: Introduction to the Nelson Mandela Rules International Training Programme
This publication has been developed to guide trainers leading 4-day in-person training courses for prison staff designed by the OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and Penal Reform International (PRI) in partnership with the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (SPPS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This manual […]
Languages: English
Annual Report
Annual Report 2022
This Annual Report outlines the impact of our work and achievements in 2022, including: In 2022 we supported national authorities, civil society and other stakeholders across 15 countries in five regions to bring change so that ultimately the human rights of people in contact with criminal justice systems are better protected. We put people at […]
Languages: English