DUSHANBE, July 23, 2014, Asia-Plus -- More than 10,000 people, including 307 women and 61 minors, are currently being held in Tajikistan’s jails, penal colonies and pretrial detention centers, Minister of Justice Rustam Shohmurod announced at a news conference in Dushanbe on July 23.

“More than 1,500 of them are still under investigation that is they are not convicted yet,” the minister said.

The minister noted that mortality rate in local jails had declined.  “Over the first six months of this year, 45 deaths have been reported in jails,” Shohmurod noted.

On the prison conditions in Tajikistan, the minister noted that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Mendez, had assessed them as satisfactory.

“Mr. Mendez visited Tajikistan two or three times and we gave him an opportunity to meet with prison inmates.  He visited penitentiary institutions without our employees.  Mr. Mendez made a number of recommendations.  We explained that our penitentiary institutions had been built between the 1930s and 1960s.”

We will recall that during his visit to Tajikistan in February this year, in the context of monitoring places of detention, the Special Rapporteur welcomed the expansion of the Ombudsperson’s mandate and that office’s willingness to cooperate with civil society to conduct visits to detention facilities.  He regretted, however, that in recent cases civil society representatives were denied access to prisons to investigate alleged acts of mistreatment.