On 9-12 December 2013, PRI and the Penal Reform and Justice Association (PRAJA) ran a training of trainers workshop (ToT) on human rights and prison management for Indian Prison Officials. Twenty prison managers from India’s eastern states – Jharkhand, Mizoram and West Bengal – took part in the four-day course on human rights and prison management, which […]
This Saturday, PRI and its local partner BLAST, will be holding a national seminar on probation as an alternative to imprisonment. While the legislative framework in Bangladesh allows for offenders charged with a wide range of minor offences to be placed on probation, it is rarely used, and overreliance on prison sentences has contributed to severe […]
On Friday, PRI and its partner the Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT) launched the a new joint publication – the Detention Monitoring Tool – at the Palais Wilson, Headquarters of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Monitoring bodies are most effective when they focus on a preventive approach, ie […]
On 18 November, Yemen’s Interior Minister Abdul-Qader Qahtan met in Sanaa with Mrs Taghreed Jaber, PRI’s Regional Director in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The discussion focused on cooperation and coordination between the Interior Ministry and PRI, particularly with regard to establishing specialised juvenile centres in the governorates of Aden, Taiz, Hadramout, Ibb, and […]
On 6-8 November, PRI co-hosted an Africa Alternatives to Imprisonment Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in partnership with the Government Probation Departments in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and our local NGO partners in the region. Twenty senior officials from Government Probation and Community Service departments in eight African countries (Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South […]
PRI is happy to announce the launch of its new training resource: Protecting children’s rights in criminal justice systems: a training manual and reference point for professionals and policymakers. Children in conflict or contact with criminal justice or welfare agencies either as children in need of protection, children at risk, on arrest, during trial, in […]
The start of November has seen two important steps forward to help protect the rights of children in conflict or in contact with the criminal justice system. Firstly, we are very pleased to announce the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) has adopted the first ever General Comment […]
For the past two years PRI has been working with the national and local authorities in Kazakhstan on a programme designed to improve prisoners’ chances of getting work and being successfully reintegrated into their communities on release. In 2010, the responsibility for social and economic reintegration of prisoners was passed to the local authorities (akimats) […]
Experts from nine countries met in Amman today (7 November 2013) to discuss the review the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (SMR). The outcomes, which will be summarised in a paper (the ‘Amman paper’), will feed into the current discussions at UN level on updating outdated areas of the UN Standard Minimum […]
This past week at the UN General Assembly in New York has seen some significant developments towards changing the reality for women prisoners. Yesterday the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo, presented a new report to the UN General Assembly, Pathways to, conditions and consequences of incarceration of […]