UK is mulling over options to ease overcrowding in prisons and considers Estonian jails as one destination for inmates,
The Times reports.
Alex Chalk, the UK justice secretary, said that he is considering how other countries have rented cells abroad in the past, including Norway and Belgium. Estonia is one of the countries that the UK government is in talks with and Chalk visited the country in the summer.
New legislation will be included in next month’s King’s Speech, to allow for the transfer of prisoners to overseas jails.
Norway has rented prison cells from the Netherlands under the Norgerhaven agreement. About 650 prisoners convicted in Norway were sent to Norgerhaven Prison in the Netherlands to serve their sentence between 2015-2018.
Belgium also rented spare prison capacity in the Netherlands under the Nova Belgica agreement from 2010 to 2016, which led to between 500 and 650 prisoners convicted in Belgium, including foreign criminals, transferred to the Netherlands.
The plans are the latest measures to deal with declining capacity, with just 768 available places left in jails across England and Wales as of last week.
Agreements would mean that prisoners in the UK could be moved to another country’s prison provided the facilities, regime and rehabilitation provided meets British standards. They might only be foreign offenders or could include remand prisoners and British inmates.
Chalk said: “This government is doing more than any since the Victorian era to expand prison capacity. Alongside our extra 20,000 prison places programme, refurbishment of old prisons and rapid deployment cells, renting prison places in other countries will ensure that we always have the space to keep the public safe from the most dangerous offenders.”
Rait Kuuse, the Ministry of Justice undersecretary for prisons told ERR's Russian-language news that the number of inmates in Estonia is falling, while cell occupancy rates are already among the lowest in the EU. Kuuse stressed that the talks were very much at a preliminary stage, and that the legislature in Estonia would need to be involved, should things ever get that far.
Former Minister of Justice Lea Danislon-Järg (Isamaa) told ERR News in February that there was plenty of spare capacity in Estonia's jails and that accommodating inmates from other countries was thus a potential option.
