Afghanistan

Senior UN officials in Afghanistan have urged the Government to look at alternatives to imprisonment as well as ways to ensure the rights of detainees, citing the growing number of people being held in pre-trial detention and various abuses such as being kept in prison even after a sentence has been completed. "Pre-trial detention is supposed to be the exception, not the rule. But here it is more the rule, especially if you are poor and without powerful friends," Christina Oguz, Country Representative for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told a news conference in Kabul Dec. 1. (UN News Service)