Bujumbura - The East African Community Heads of Prisons/Correctional services are meeting in Kigali to work out a detailed plan for cooperation.

The five-day forum kicked-off yesterday.

Addressing the delegates, Beatrice Kiraso, the EAC Deputy Secretary General in charge of Political Federation, urged the experts to diligently work through the identified areas of cooperation and come up with a detailed action plan.

"We must not lose sight of the fact that, implementation of the cooperation framework will be the primary responsibility of the partner states within resources available to the sector,” she added.

Kiraso stressed that prisons or correctional services are the tail end of the governance, justice, law and order process and this makes them more significant in upholding and protection of human rights.

 "I encourage you to explore and build further these innovative approaches to your cooperation framework with a practical, feasible, realistic and implementable action plan,” she told the delegates.

The identified areas of cooperation include governance and management framework, technical cooperation, human resource development, education and training.

Others are research, data collection learning and knowledge exchange and as well confidence building measures.

Emmanuel Rukundo, the Director of Planning, Production, Research and Cooperation in the National Prisons Service, noted that cooperation among prisons was vital in deepening the integration of the regional bloc.

"We are going to come up with a detailed work plan and propose implementation modalities for the prisons service sector,” he said, adding that modalities for the cooperation will be developed after the adoption of the action plan.

This is the second meeting of prison chiefs after the first one that was held in Arusha Tanzania last year.

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