GENERAL INFORMATION
 

Project title
 

IMPROVEMENT OF ENFORCEMENT SERVICES IN PRISONS

Priority area
 

Justice

Beneficiary

Ministry of Justice’s General Directorate of Prisons and Detention Houses (GDPDH)

Co-Beneficiary
 

Duration

Duration: 24 Months

Start: 26/11/2014

End: 26/11/2014

EU contribution (Euro)

€ 5,900,000

PROJECT SUMMARY

Brief description of the project and main objectives
 

Addressing the requirements of reform in judiciary and law enforcement services as part of the Copenhagen political criteria has long been a priority for Turkey and EU-Turkey financial cooperation, in particular. The Turkish criminal justice reform in prisons has received EU’s financial support with “the Judicial Modernization and Penal Reform Programme (2005-2007)” and “Dissemination of Model Prison Practices and Promotion of the Prison Reform in Turkey (2009-2012)” as other joint interventions followed through on this mean. Achieving improvement in prison conditions and infrastructure in order to protect the human rights of those that are deprived of their liberty clearly entails some actions towards amending the conditions of the prison staff in charge of treatment of prisoners to avoid human rights violations as set out by internationally acknowledged standards. As Turkey is not an exception to this challenging task at hand, establishing a statutory framework for a range of recent penal measures and practices to offer modern, professional and humane services to the penal enforcement officers, while improving the human resources at the penal system was aimed with the materialization of the project in question.

Turkey is a party to numerous international conventions and regularly monitored by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). Accordingly, European Commission’s Turkey 2015 Progress Report underlines the relevance of the project.

Within the scope of the project, improvement of enforcement services in prisons will be pursued with the execution of three components. This TA project is complemented by two contracts: a Twinning (completed) on developing human resource tools and techniques, as well as on staff training and development and a Supply Contract (partly completed, will be relaunched) to provide computer equipment and specialised software for a central unit and class labs in prisons across Turkey.

The beneficiary of the project is the Ministry of Justice’s General Directorate of Prisons and Detention Houses (GDPDH). The objective of increasing the efficiency of human resources of GDPDH that was primarily addressed with the Twinning and Supply Components, will be complemented by, once achieved, significant contributions of this Technical Assistance (TA) component. This TA consist of introduction of assessment tools on motivation/risk/profile of offenders into the prison enforcement system to implement individual focused intervention programs and will provide a classification of the offenders according to their criminal motives and development of a risk assessment tool and motivation classification study which would be first of its kind in Turkey.

Location

Achievements / expected outputs

Result 1: High degree of efficiency of enforcement service,

Result 2: Prison management standards increased and treatment of inmates reached to the international standards.