Current projects in Southeast Asia include the following:
Improving the treatment of children in conflict with the law in Indonesia
Penal Reform International (PRI), the International Legal Foundation (ILF) and the Indonesian Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR), have started a new partnership with the support of UNICEF to assist the Indonesian government in protecting the rights of children in conflict with the law.
The Government of Indonesia has placed implementing the Juvenile Criminal Justice Law as a national priority in the Development Plan 2020-2024, and has launched the Roadmap to Strengthen Juvenile Criminal System 2023-2027 as the first step to realize it. The strategies inside the Roadmap include (a) improving the quality of diversion and the implementation of the alternative to detention; (b) strengthening inter-ministerial collaboration, quality data and information; and (c) increasing access to quality services.
The aim of this new project is to strengthen the quality of diversion, rehabilitation and reintegration services for children in Indonesia. This will involve a threefold approach: to support the Government to monitor implementation of the juvenile criminal system; to develop a tool to assess the conditions and situation of children in conflict with the law, and to train 50 correctional and probation officers in using the monitoring and assessment tool. Importantly, the project will involve young people with lived experience of the criminal justice system in all stages of the project including training of correctional officers.
The project runs from January 2023 to March 2024.
Previous programmes in the region:
Supporting criminal justice reform in the Philippines
PRI worked with and was supported by, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in the Philippines on a project in 2022-23, Protecting prisoners’ human rights in the Philippines through capacity building for correctional staff and detention monitoring. The project aimed to improve human rights protection in detention by increasing capacity among jail and prison staff (where occupancy levels are currently over 350% nationally), as well as external prison monitoring mechanisms, on practical implementation of international standards related to places of detention, including the UN Nelson Mandela Rules and Bangkok Rules.