As the guardian of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), UNODC has a long history of providing technical assistance and advisory services to the Member States in the field of prison reform. Its Global Programme for the Implementation of the Doha Declaration, therefore, includes a dedicated component on strengthening the rehabilitation of prisoners, including their social reintegration upon release.
The Zambia Correctional Service (ZCS) and the General Directorate of Penitentiary Institutions of Kyrgyzstan have recently become amongst the national prison administrations that will receive technical support from UNODC to enhance the range and quality of rehabilitation programmes.
UNODC's Education for Justice (E4J) initiative held its third hackathon (or coding challenge) in Indonesia, through its Country Office in Jakarta. The event - #Hack4Justice - saw some 30 secondary school students between the ages of 13 and 18 gather in Jakarta, Indonesia to battle it out at the keyboard and show off their ideas and talent in developing educational games focussing on justice and rule of law issues.
Organized in partnership with the Indonesian Ministry of Education, the hackathon feeds into the development of a series of interactive tools to help students learn about these issues as part of the organization's Global Programme for the implementation of the Doha Declaration. With secondary school students as the ultimate consumers of the final games, the hackathons present an ideal opportunity to involve them right from the start - and to gauge the approaches youth would take to teach justice values among their peers.
In late-October, UNODC, the Kyrgyz State Agency on Youth, Physical Culture and Sports, and Bishkek City Mayor's Office teamed up to deliver a three-day pilot training-course for sports trainers and physical education school teachers to implement the Line Up Live Up curriculum for at-risk youth.
The training is part of UNODC's global work aimed at providing teachers with tools that assists them in further delivering sport-oriented trainings on life skills: an integral part of crime prevention among youth. Some 23 coaches and physical education schoolteachers, selected by the Kyrgyz and Tajik authorities, were trained on the Line Up Live Up methodology through a set of interactive sessions based on a UNODC-developed Trainer Manual.
At a major United Nations anti-corruption conference, UNODC unveiled a new cartoon campaign to promote ethics and values teaching to primary school children. Based on an animated series, The Zorbs, the campaign tells of an imaginary planet and its inhabitants who overcome a range of challenges thanks to core values and skills as promoted under the organization's Education for Justice (E4J) initiative, which is a key component of the Global Programme, funded by the State of Qatar.
The series has been designed as a fun yet informative education tool, and will comprise a set of animated videos, complemented by an online interactive Comic Creator that encourages children to build meaningful stories in an engaging and creative way.
"Finding the perfect balance between integrity, transparency, accountability and judicial independence is absolutely essential," said UNODC's Oliver Stolpe at a special event on preventing corruption in the justice sector held on the margins of this week's Seventh Session of the Conference of States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC).
Speaking on this issue, he was joined by others including Tilman Hoppe, a consultant with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH ; Christina Tarna, an anti-Corruption Expert in the Republic of Moldova; and Judge Rafael Menezes, vice-president of the International Association of Judges.
