Nelson Mandela Rules
Definition
The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, revised and renamed by the UN General Assembly in December 2015, setting the baseline international standards on prison conditions and treatment.
Related terms
- Custodial Death
- A death occurring while a person is in police or judicial custody, tracked separately in official statistics because it signals possible failures...
- Overcrowding
- A prison population that exceeds its officially sanctioned or design capacity, usually expressed as an occupancy percentage or ratio of inmates to...
- Undertrial Prisoner
- A person held in custody while awaiting or undergoing trial, not yet convicted, a category that forms the majority of the prison...
- Correctional Understaffing
- A shortfall in the sanctioned strength of prison staff, particularly custodial, medical, and correctional (welfare and vocational) cadres, relative to the population...
- Deliberate Indifference
- Also called 'willful blindness' or 'conscious avoidance' in some jurisdictions: the doctrine that a defendant cannot escape knowledge of a fact by...
- Dietary Scale
- An official schedule specifying the quantity, calorie content, and nutritional composition of food a prison must serve, often varying by labour classification,...
- Non-Custodial Measures
- Sentences or pre-trial measures that do not involve imprisonment, such as probation, community service, suspended sentences, fines and diversion, the subject of...
- Prison Privatisation
- The transfer of prison construction, management, or specific services such as food and healthcare to private for-profit contractors, ranging from full-facility operation...
- Soft Law
- A standard adopted by an international body, such as a General Assembly resolution, that carries persuasive and interpretive weight but is not...
- Solitary Confinement
- The confinement of a prisoner for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact; the Nelson Mandela Rules cap it...
- Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners
- The original 1955 instrument on prison conditions, adopted at the First UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of...
- Tokyo Rules
- The UN Standard Minimum Rules for Non-custodial Measures, adopted by UN General Assembly resolution 45/110 in 1990, setting safeguards for probation, community...
Explained in these topics
- Challenges in Correctional Administration
- Prison Conditions: Accommodation, Food, and Healthcare StandardsThe 2015 revision of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, a non-binding set of 122 international standards covering accommodation, foo...
- UN Standards for Offender Treatment: the Nelson Mandela Rules and the Tokyo RulesThe UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners as revised and adopted by UN General Assembly resolution 70/175 in 2015, named after Nelson Mandel...