In the frame of the PHARE ACCESS 2003 Makro Program, the Menedék Association and the polish Halina Niec Human Rights Association started the trainings for jail keepers to improve their communication and conflict attendance program in July 2005. The aims of the project are to enhance the situation of the foreigners who are in frontier guard jails, refresher courses for the workers of the jail, expecially through their communication and conflict attendance. By means of the consultations between the professors of the UNHCR and civil services, and also the oppinion of our social workers, we agreed that the preparedness of the jail keepers is indispensable and also some special professional trainigs which dealing with the treatment of the people who belong to different ethnic, culture, religious groups. These people often suffer in trauma and they run away from the armed forces. The professors of the frontier guard agreed with us and they are really significant help since the project has started. Before we decided what will be the „line” of the trainigs, we made a survey among the jail keepers and the prisoners, which can show the faults. We made interviews so that we know something about the keepers’s demand and their most common problems. From the prisoners we wanted to ask what are the problems which make their detention harder and what are the sources of the conflict between the keepers and the prisoners. In Hungary we made these interviews in 3 frontier guard jails, in Kiskunhalas, Győr and Budapest, which wanted to find the answer for the sources of the conflicts in these themes: safety, accomodation, ocntact with other person, freetime, religion and communication.
Meeting for improving the training- material in Budapest:
After the evaluation of the interviews we organized a meeting for improving the training material in Budapest, where the participants were the members of the educational group, 3 members of the UNHCR office in Budapest, and also the head of the educational class of the frontier guard. After we discussed the reports of the situations, we started to work out the network of the training’s themes. Through the interviews we discovered that the main sources of the conflicts where the shortage of communication, the late reaction on the conflicts and the doubtfulness of the prisoners. These are the reasons why we made this trainings really realistic, because this helps for the jail keepers to know how important their decisions are. In February 90 immigration officers training will start in the International Educational Center of BM. The training of Végh József were really successful and it had a positive response from the participants and also from the leaders. We taped the simulation practices on video, and through the analysis of these little films we discovered the deficiencies and after the second day there was improvement for the prisoners. Furthermore, we planned to establish a reference book, which consists of the information and the achievements of the project which will be available to others.
Project manager: Zsolt Belánszky - zsolt.belanszky@menedek.hu