Court judges have replaced 1,066 prison sentences for non-repetitive offenses with community service, by intensifying the Judicial Council’s procedures aimed at expanding the application of alternatives to penalties depriving of liberty, and by putting in place systematic and studied steps in conjunction with the entry into force of the recent amendments to the Penal Code.

The Secretary-General of the Judicial Council, and its official spokesman, Judge Ali Al-Musimi told the Jordan News Agency (Petra) today, Sunday, that in light of the recent amendments to the Penal Code related to alternative measures to custodial penalties that were implemented on June 24, the Judicial Council worked to ensure proper implementation of these measures. amendments and their effective implementation.

He added that, in order to achieve this goal, a plan of action was developed through which the Council, before the entry into force of the provisions of the law, held meetings with the judges of all criminal courts in the Kingdom, to put them in the form of these amendments and indicate their nature and mechanisms for their implementation through a judicial committee that prepared these amendments and participated in drafting them .

These meetings included a meeting of the President of the Council with the judges, motivating them to implement these alternatives, pointing to the importance of their application and the positive effects that result from their application in strengthening the protection of community security, through reforming and rehabilitating the perpetrators themselves and ensuring that they do not return to committing the crime.

He pointed out that a specialized training program was designed to target all criminal court judges, dealing with the mechanisms of applying these alternatives, enhancing the judges’ conviction of their importance, and setting an indicator to measure the progress achieved in implementing the plan, which is the increase in the number of judicial rulings issued by resorting to alternatives to custodial penalties, with a percentage of 100 percent. The number of judgments issued this year before the law was amended on June 24, amounting to 414 judgments, and an additional 828 judgments are expected to be issued by the end of this year, bringing the total judgments issued by the end of this year to 1242.

Judge Al-Musimi explained that, through follow-up, until today, the courts, after the implementation of the provisions of the amendments to the law, issued 652 judicial rulings in which alternatives to the penalties depriving of liberty were applied to the convicts. At the end of this year, in just two months.

(Petra)