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, […]
The proceedings are being streamed live by the UN. Click here to watch. The statement will call on all states that retain the death penalty to ensure that it is not imposed on those who were under the age of 18 at the time of the alleged offence, or on those who have mental or intellectual disabilities. […]
PRI’s Programme Development Director, Nikhil Roy, took part in a panel discussion on indefinite prison sentences (IPPs) on Voice of Russia today. The discussion follows last week’s judgment by the European Court of Human Rights that imprisoning people indefinitely without providing timely access to rehabilitation programmes to progress their sentences is a breach of human […]
PRI has today published a new resource – Making Community Service Work: A Resource Pack from East Africa – which provides information and material about how community service has developed as an alternative to imprisonment in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Sentencing offenders to do unpaid work of public benefit has many advantages. It is cheaper and less harmful […]
In her article, The Living Death of Solitary Confinement, Lisa Guenther, an associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University (Tennessee), argues it is profoundly harmful for both prisoners and society to isolate people in units where they are neither allowed nor obliged to create and sustain meaningful, supportive relationships with others. The article trails Professor Guenther’s forthcoming book Social […]