Central Asia

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 Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan and Bishkek, 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, developing effective probation systems and supporting the rehabilitation and reintegration of people in prison into society. We are also involved in combatting violent extremism and radicalisation in prisons.