Kurdistan Region Police Reform Begins With UN Development Partnership
Kurdistan Region Ministry of Interior official Hemin Mirani says police reform with UNDP begins with four model stations and will cover traffic and civil defense.
ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - Police reform in the Kurdistan Region is set to begin in partnership with the UN Development Program (UNDP), covering every sector under the Ministry of Interior, including domestic police, traffic, and civil defense, a senior ministry official told Kurdistan24 on Wednesday.
Hemin Mirani, Director General of the Office of the Ministry of Interior of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), said in an exclusive statement that the involvement of UNDP is an important and strategic step toward transferring international experience into the Kurdistan Region’s police force.
He said the UN agency will serve as a partner in modernizing and developing the “model police” sector.
Describing the stages of implementation, Mirani explained that four police stations have initially been designated as model stations.
These four stations will then become a center and a school for training and preparing other police stations, with the aim of spreading the new working method across all security centers.
The director general of the ministry’s office also stressed that the reform will not stop at the boundaries of the domestic police. Instead, he said, it will be comprehensive and will fully include the traffic and civil defense sectors.
Within its reform agenda, the ninth cabinet of the KRG has made institutionalizing the security forces and strengthening their capacity one of its priorities.
In that context, the Ministry of Interior has recently taken a number of steps toward digitizing services, reorganizing staffing, and modernizing traffic and civil defense procedures.
Partnership with international agencies, particularly UNDP, is part of the Kurdistan Region’s new vision for implementing the concept of “community policing.”
The aim is to develop the competence of the interior forces on the basis of global standards and respect for human rights during law enforcement.