Repatriating European Prisoners
01 November 1994
A report from the Penal Affairs Consortium calls for reforms to enable more prisoners from other European countries in British prisons to be transferred to their own countries. The UK ratified the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners in 1985 but in the intervening eight years only 92 had been successfully repatriated. In September 1993 there were 846 prisoners form EU states in British prisons. 529 of these were Irish nationals but the Republic of Ireland is the only EU state not to have ratified the Convention. The report says:
"Prisons in England and Wales are often ill-equipped to meet the social, educational and welfare needs of foreign nationals. Foreign nationals tend to be alienated from the main cultural environment of the prison, are not adequately catered for by training and educational services, experience the breakdown of family ties and are denied home visits outside the UK to help them reintegrate into their communities before their release. Allowing foreign nationals to return to their own countries to serve their sentence would seem the obvious solution."
Repatriating European Prisoners: the repatriation of sentenced prisoners from England and Wales to other member states of the European Union, November, 1994, 8 pages, available free from: The Penal Affairs Consortium, c/o 169 Clapham Road, London SW9 0PU.