Penal Reform and the Rights of Detainees
Focus AreasThe Human Rights and Governance Grants Program has launched an initiative to engage with its network of partner organizations across Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to take a more proactive role in shaping the penal reform agenda and to ensure that reforms dealing with incarcerated populations are launched or reinvigorated.
Ensuring public oversight of prisons and respect for human rights in places of detention is central to the Open Society Institute's funding priorities in the region. While enormous progress has been made on these issues over the last 15 years, the needs remain acute. Torture is still more the rule than the exception in a number of countries; alternatives to detention and incarceration seem to exist only on paper; the rhetoric on prisons and penal reform is dominated by a “tough on crime” stance, with little to no concern for the rights of those involved. Civil society plays a limited role in monitoring conditions or highlighting the need for public oversight. The climate for reform in the region grows increasingly unfavorable: the international security agenda has had a negative impact on penal politics; enthusiasm for the region’s democratization has faded; and rehabilitation is either considered to be an old state-socialist idea that failed, or a Western concept that is beyond the financial reach of most states.
Despite this bleak outlook, there are a number of meaningful opportunities. By taking advantage of the Human Rights and Governance Grants Program’s existing relationships with a large segment of the NGO community already involved in penal reform and securing the rights of detainees, there are a number of areas in which the program will be working to stimulate more concerted action.
A new opportunity to strengthen public oversight over prisons is provided by the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture ratifications across the region. The program will continue to provide core support to human rights groups engaging in prison monitoring work, and will encourage them to work on ratifying and implementing the protocol at the domestic level.
Human rights groups have published an impressive number of monitoring reports about prison conditions in recent years, often providing the only reliable information on prisons available to the public. In order to maximize the potential impact of these efforts and increase the efficacy of their advocacy efforts, communication with the general public on prison and penal reform issues must become more innovative and engaging. Interested human rights groups are encouraged to use their existing experience and capacities in new ways to define penal reform objectives and put them on the agenda. In order to help groups develop more compelling messages and effective communication strategies, the program will be offering support for more targeted penal reform advocacy projects across the region through means of a separate funding stream, and will provide networking, capacity building and training opportunities to its existing grantees.
Despite the adoption of legislation on alternatives across the region, very little progress has been made in substituting non-custodial alternative sentences for imprisonment. Virtually the only countries where significant progress can be measured in the use of community service as a sentence are those where an active, strong and knowledgeable civil society actor was able to implement pilot projects that were taken over by the state. To this end, under the advocacy project scheme noted above, the program will seek to support initiatives that focus on policy changes or changes in implementation procedures to increase the use of alternatives, both at the pretrial and sentencing stage. As with the other advocacy project efforts, coalition-building with other civil society groups and a strong communication element are encouraged.
There is also a great need for research and data collection and analysis of data to understand better the current penal reform landscape across the region. There are a number of outstanding penal reform experts working strictly in their own local contexts in the region whose extensive knowledge and expertise could be a great benefit for other groups. In order to attract progressive individuals and provide the opportunity for them to work together with human rights groups on research and advocacy projects, the Human Rights and Governance Grants Program is seeking to establish an Advocacy Fellows project to complement its other advocacy initiatives.
