THE GOVERNMENT of Canada through the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI) Jamaica, has made a contribution of J$500,000 to the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights (IJCHR) to assist with efforts to reduce the number of mentally ill persons in the island's prisons.
The contribution was recently handed over to the IJCHR by Claudio Valle, Canada's High Commissioner to Jamaica.
The money will go towards the IJCHR's Mentally Ill Persons in Prisons Project. The goal of the project is to:
Locate all persons who have been remanded in custody on the basis that they were unfit to plead, and assess their fitness to plead.
Have all persons who are fit to plead placed before the court and their cases disposed of.
Secure accommodation and aftercare for those detainees/inmates released.
Have the cases of persons still unfit to plead, monitored by the court and disposed of once they have been assessed by a psychiatrist.
The IJCHR was established in 1968 as the Jamaica Council for Human Rights and re-incorporated in 1998 as the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights. In order to undertake its mandate, the IJCHR's activities are focussed on three areas, namely human rights education, advocacy, and constitutional and legal reform. Since December 2000, the IJCHR has been concerned about persons held in correctional centres without a finding of guilt because they are unfit to plead.
