The new concept of the system of punishments has been presented, Hubs reports.

The Cabinet of Ministers has liquidated the Penitentiary Service and delegated its authorities to the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. The relevant decision at the government session on Wednesday, May 18, was unanimously approved after the presentation of the concept of a new system of execution of punishments, which was presented by First Deputy Minister of Justice Natalia Sevastianova.

According to her, the standards of execution of punishments have not changed for 75 years – they are not even soviet, they are of the tsarist-era… Today the facilities, where our convicts do their time, are more than 150 years old. This is the largest legacy of the Soviet Union, which was left to us as the independent country.

In its turn, Minister of Justice Pavel Petrenko urged the members of the Cabinet of Ministers to endorse this reform.

“I am referring to almost 80,000 people, which are currently behind bars, I am referring to the lives of those people, who guard them – because the prison conditions are awful… you know such a phrase: the one who guards, and the one, who is behind bars, actually both serve time. They are just on different sides of the wall”, - he stated.

The Minister added that he was referring to the hundreds of thousands and their families, on the “principle of primacy of law and protection of rights of a person – the main value in the country”.

“If we do this reform jointly with the reform of the judicial system and law enforcement system – then we will be able to say precisely: we have changed this country, and the ordinary man will be superior in this country, and nobody will abuse the human dignity”, Petrenko noted.