Earlier this week the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) brought together 57 participating states and a multitude of civil society organisations. One of the recurring themes in the deliberations on Tuesday afternoon was how violence against women in all corners of the globe is a barrier to […]
27th September 2013
In August, PRI’s Executive Director and Evaluation and Learning Adviser visited our Moscow office to carry out training on monitoring and evaluation and to talk to some of the partners we work with there. Our current work in Russia includes promoting alternatives to imprisonment, particularly probation, improving public oversight of prisons and implementing the rights […]
24th September 2013
Recently Dinara Dildabekova, Death Penalty Project Manager in PRI’s office in Central Asia, organised two two-day training workshops (one in Kazakhstan and one in Tajikistan) to train prison officials on international human rights standards on the rights of those on death row or those serving a life or long-term sentence. In Kazakhstan training was held […]
24th September 2013
Morocco’s Islamist-led government has unveiled a charter outlining a raft of long-awaited judicial reforms including a strengthening of the judiciary’s independence that have been a priority of the ruling party. The charter was presented late Thursday by the justice ministry, some two years after the kingdom adopted a new constitution in the face of sweeping […]
17th September 2013
Oliver Robertson, PRI’s new manager for our Death Penalty and Alternatives project, reports from a successful panel at the 24th session of the Human Rights Council on the rights of children of parents sentenced to death. ‘I do not think we will have any problems tomorrow” Francis told me ‘because we are talking about children, […]
16th September 2013
Brian Citro is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and a Clinic Fellow in the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. Here he reports on current efforts to advocate for a federal ban on the shackling of detained and incarcerated women during pregnancy. When LaDonna Hopkins went into labor in an Illinois […]
12th September 2013
In 2007, Inga Abramova from Belarus was arrested as she was hanging ribbons to raise awareness of the ‘European March’ campaign and detained for five days for ‘minor hooliganism.’ Inga was held underground in a poorly lit and cold cell in a facility staffed exclusively by male guards. The guards made frequent comments about Inga ‘joking’ that […]
19th August 2013
Laura W. Murphy, Director, of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Washington Legislative Office & Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice respond to US Attorney General’s call for major criminal justice reform, including an end to mandatory minimums for certain low-level, non-violent drug offences. Attorney General Eric Holder just called mass incarceration a moral and economic failure. He just […]
14th August 2013
All prisoners, including those sentenced to life imprisonment, should have a prospect of release. Failure to provide for such a prospect by setting up a mechanism to review life sentences after a reasonable period amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment, which infringes the prohibition on such treatment in Article 3 of the European Convention on […]
24th July 2013
Training on the UN Bangkok Rules for prison officials in Bangladesh provides an insight into the problems faced by women prisoners, as well as some positive progress. Overcrowding in prisons is a major problem in many countries, and Bangladesh is no exception. While there is prison capacity for only around 27,368 people, the system […]
19th July 2013