Last week, Taghreed Jaber, Regional Director of PRI’s Middle East and North Africa (PRI MENA) office, and Yemen’s Prisons Director, Major General Mohamed Ali Alzelb, signed an agreement of cooperation for an initiative to protect vulnerable groups in Yemeni prisons and to provide training for Yemeni prison staff. The initiative is part of a wider […]
PRI Central Asia’s Azamat Shambilov was interviewed as part of a Channel Eurasia feature on popular opinion on the death penalty in Kazakstan on World Day Against the Death Penalty last week. Click here to view it (in Russian)
World Day Against the Death Penalty is organised by the World Coalition against the Death Penalty to raise government and public awareness about the continuing use of the death penalty around the world. Since the World Day was first held a decade ago, significant progress has been made towards ending the death penalty, with 141 […]
Ahead of an Inter-governmental Expert Group meeting (IEGM) on the Review of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners in Buenos Aires in December, a summary of outcomes from an independent experts’ meeting held at the University of Essex on 3 and 4 October 2012 on the proposed reform of the Rules […]
The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) presented this year’s background paper on the death penalty in the OSCE region yesterday at the annual OSCE human rights conference in Warsaw. This year’s paper reports on developments in the OSCE area, including Latvia’s ratification of Protocol 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which […]
PRI’s Middle East and North Africa office held a two-day workshop on ‘Alternative sanctions to detention: prospects for and ways of promoting their application in Jordan’ this week by the Dead Sea. Participating were representatives of media organisations in Jordan, audio-visual, print and electronic media, along with civil society organisations active in the field of […]
This international conference on Violence against Children in Juvenile Justice Systems was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan jointly with UNICEF, with support from the European Union, the Department of International Development and the British Embassy in Bishkek. Participants from approximately 14 countries attended, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Tanzania, and […]
This week, PRI delivered a statement to the OSCE’s annual human rights conference (the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting) in Warsaw on the monitoring of places of detention and the role of preventive monitoring. In particular, the statement stressed that a combination of preventive work by National Preventive Mechanisms (looking at more general risk factors) and reactive monitoring […]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, 21 September 2012 —The Kyrgyz Parliament and Government are hosting an international conference today to reduce violence against children in conflict with the law with the support of The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Penal Reform International (PRI). Globally, the vast majority of children are detained for non-violent crimes including running away […]
PRI has published new research examining law and policy in relation to violence against children in particular during arrest and in pre-trial detention in eight countries (Bangladesh, Georgia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Tanzania and Uganda). There are estimated to be over one million children in detention around the world, the vast majority detained for non-violent offences, […]