Kazakhstan’s Constitutional Court received a petition seeking a review of provisions in the Criminal Code, Criminal Procedure Code and Penal Enforcement Code. The provisions concern credit for time in pretrial detention, parole conditions and the assessment of a convicted person’s conduct.
The petition followed a court’s refusal to grant parole to a person serving a prison sentence. The applicant argued that the court had not properly considered his conduct while in detention before the sentence became final, even though that time counts toward the sentence. He said this approach violated the principle of equality before the law and the courts.
The Constitutional Court said parole is an institution of criminal law whose conditions and procedures are established by law. Serving the required part of a sentence is necessary but is not the only condition for release. A court assesses a convicted person’s conduct while serving the sentence and the degree to which they have been rehabilitated.
The court stressed that detention before a sentence becomes final and serving a sentence have different legal status. The presumption of innocence applies during detention, and detention conditions do not provide the same extent of rehabilitative measures as the enforcement of a criminal sentence. Crediting time in detention toward a sentence therefore does not make the legal regimes of the two periods identical.
At the same time, penal enforcement law does not rule out considering information about a person’s conduct in detention when a court reviews parole.
The Constitutional Court also found that courts had not applied several of the contested provisions when considering the applicant’s motion. For a citizen’s petition to be admissible, the contested provision must have been applied in the specific case.
The court said that the applicant’s arguments about the assessment of his conduct and whether courts of general jurisdiction applied the law correctly concern the particular case and fall outside the Constitutional Court’s jurisdiction.
