Prison Oversight: Improving Prisons in Europe

Introduction

With 1.5 million people in prison across Europe, and a need to ensure human rights standards are upheld in places of detention, international oversight of prisons plays a fundamental role in upholding European values and ensuring decent and fair treatment. Oversight of prisons by international human rights bodies, such as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), is now a growing and global phenomenon.

Project Background

The PRILA project, from which this proposal derives, discovered that while oversight of prisons has value, it is undermined by inconsistent government engagement and by low awareness of human rights and oversight functions amongst prisoners.

Objectives of POIRE

Prison Oversight: Improving Rights in Europe (POIRE) addresses these challenges. It is the first initiative to:

1. Develop, test, and evaluate a set of programmes that support and train governments in how they report to the CPT, a longstanding and well-respected prison oversight body.
2. Raise awareness of human rights and oversight in prisoner populations.

Implementation Strategy

POIRE will:

• Assess need,
• Develop,
• Design and deliver its programmes,
• Evaluate them for effectiveness in two case study countries subject to a visit from the CPT.

Expected Outcomes

Its findings will also feed into a public policy arm, which will make submissions for reform to the legal frameworks for prison oversight in Europe and globally, contributing to sustainable and embedded change.

Future Sustainability

A key element of POIRE is to lay the foundations for a post-POIRE spin-off, not-for-profit enterprise to deliver its programmes to states, prison systems, oversight bodies, and NGOs globally.

Conclusion

POIRE seeks to strengthen international oversight in prisons and states and prisoners' capacity to engage with human rights monitoring. In so doing, POIRE aims to improve human rights compliance in prisons and support prisoner engagement with rights, thereby upholding the European value of fundamental rights protection in places where they are vulnerable.