QUNO helps draft rules for women prisoners
QUNO’s Women in Prison: Commentary on the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners was a major reference tool for the preparation of new draft UN Rules for the Specific Treatment of Women Prisoners and women in custodial and non-custodial settings.
The new draft Rules address gaps in the Standard Minimum Rules. For example, opposing shackling women in labour, during childbirth and immediately afterwards – a practice still prevalent in some parts of the USA. One of the current draft Rules (specifically proposed by QUNO) is that when a woman with caring responsibilities for children who is not in pre-trial detention is sentenced to prison, she should, whenever possible, be given a short period of time in which to make arrangements for her children rather than, as is the present practice in the UK, being taken straight from court to prison. The draft Rules also address the need for recruitment and training for female prison staff – the lack of which makes impossible the provisions requiring that female prisoners shall be searched only by female staff.
The Thai Ministry of Justice is the initiator of the UN process. They invited two QUNO participants (Rachel Brett and Laurel Townhead, former Programme Assistant and co-author of the QUNO publication) to the expert meeting in Bangkok in February where the draft Rules were prepared. The result was presented at the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Vienna (April 2009), and a resolution adopted mandating a government expert meeting later this year to finalise the text and forward the result to the UN Crime Congress in Brazil next April.
In Vienna, Rachel Brett was a panellist, together with the Thais, to highlight why the 50-year-old UN Standard Minimum Rules need to be supplemented in order to address the specific situation of female prisoners.
Rachel Brett
QUNO Geneva
13 Avenue du Mervelet
1209 Geneva
Switzerland
