In spite of the problems highlighted in chapter 7, reform and reconstruction of the prison systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have received neither the same degree of international attention nor investment as police and court services. The matrix of twenty agencies engaged in rule of law and criminal justice reform projects in BiH in August 2004 in appendix 2 gives a snapshot of intervention. These agencies included some with mandates specific to BiH (e.g. Office of the High Representative and the European Union Police Mission), branches of the UN and EU, non-governmental organisations and charitable foundations, and nationally-run development agencies from the US and Europe. Of the twenty organisations, thirteen were involved in police reform, sixteen in the reform of judicial systems, yet only four in prison based programmes of reform at the time it was produced: the Office of the High Representative (OHR) was seeking a site for a pre-trial detention facility to serve the state-level Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sud BiH); the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was monitoring pre-trial detention as part of a mission to supervise the implementation of new Criminal Procedural Codes; only the Council of Europe and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) were engaged with reforms which dealt explicitly with the provision of facilities for convicted and sentenced inmates. Subsequent to the production of that matrix in August 2004, the Canadian International Development Agency/Agence canadienne de développement international (CIDA/ACDI) has joined reform projects in cooperation with other donors, and a newly formed Office of the Registrar for War Crimes and Organised Crime has been involved in the management of a state-level pre-trial detention unit and in planning a state-level detention facility to hold both pre-trial and sentenced inmates. Aside from such organisations actively working with BiH authorities to develop the country's prison systems, human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International, the Helsinki Committee, and Human Rights Watch have monitored and reported on conditions in BiH's prisons.

This chapter explores the work of the international community in BiH through three examples of agencies working alongside the domestic authorities to address some of the challenges facing BiH's prison systems as described in chapter 7.