Topic: Prison Reform
Country: Kazakhstan
Delegate Name: Douglas Hufnagel
School: Royal Oak High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Kazakhstan position papers GLIMUN 2008 committees
The nation of Kazakhstan recognizes the widespread problems in many of the world’s prisons, and would like to state that nations with prisons that violate human rights can be solved with largely national solutions with international oversight and aid, as our prisons have shown massive improvements in the past several years under a system of this type.
The Human Rights Education Associates recognizes our progressive penal reforms, and recognizes us as the first Central Asian nation to initiate reforms, even though we were the last of the Central Asian nations to come into existence. We have taken steps to provide personnel with medical and human rights training to protect human rights, and we have also founded a Council for Public Oversight in 2004. Even as of 2003, our prisons improved enough for the United States to begin warmer relations with us, and Penal Reform International has recognized our nations continuous progress. They have also developed an oversight mechanism for our prisons.
Our progress has, admittedly, begun to slow in the past few years as we complete our other extremely important national objectives. But the fact remains that under an almost purely national system Kazakhstan has achieved enormous success in reforming our prison system, and our constitution provides for very modern prisoner rights, including that a detained person may only be held for 72 hours without the sanction of a procurator, and the right of a detainee to access to a lawyer, as well as the right to an appeal. These rights, long guaranteed in the developed nations of the world, are recent developments in Kazakhstan, but they have been achieved by only the nation of Kazakhstan, without international violation of our sovereignty. We do accept that violations of human rights in prisons are a serious matter, but unless the problems in jails are supplemented by many other violations of human rights, national solutions are the only moral or realistic solution, and Kazakhstan will not support a resolution supporting the blatant violation of national sovereignty only because of the condition of their prisons.
