Round table: ‘Human rights protection in conditions of serving a sentence’

The All-Ukrainian Charitable Foundation ‘Legal Initiative’, within the framework of the International Renaissance Foundation project ‘Creation of a consulting and methodological centre for legal aid to convicts serving sentences in penal institutions of the Kyiv region’, held a round table on 4 April 2009, entitled ‘Human rights protection in conditions of serving a sentence’, with the participation of non-governmental organisations working with prisoners in the penal institutions of the Kyiv region.
The aim of the event was to discuss a wide range of issues related to the study of approaches and experience in protecting the rights of prisoners, upon which the experience of human rights protection is based, and a number of problematic issues of convicts to which they cannot get answers. A separate topic was the problems to which non-governmental organisations need to pay attention when receiving requests from convicts, and the methodology of providing legal aid to such convicts.
A glaring problem for many prisoners remains the lack of passports, their failure to obtain citizenship, and consequently, problems with marriage, adoption, restoration of parental rights, preservation of housing… The issue of obtaining a divorce certificate by convicts remains problematic, which leads to violations of their right to family and private life.
Unfortunately, penal institutions today are not able to independently provide high-quality legal aid to convicts or ensure the resolution of their legal needs outside the institution due to the small number of employees who have proper legal education, lack of experience in such work, and sometimes a lack of interest in assisting in the resolution of legal requests and needs of convicts.
That is why the created Consulting and Methodological Centre for Legal Aid to Convicts and their Relatives, in addition to introducing elements of international standards of legal aid to convicts, humanising the activities of the penal system, and comparing the actual situation of the realisation of human rights and the practice of their application with legal provisions and norms, and Council of Europe standards, has begun to provide methodological assistance to other non-governmental organisations that cooperate with penal institutions of the Kyiv region regarding the content, needs, and specifics of providing legal aid to different categories of convicted persons. Such an initiative was supported by all the non-governmental organisations present at the round table.