The European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment: Activities in 2001 (in ‘Human rights survey 2002’, pHR/47-HR/62)

This issue is devoted entirely to the subject of human rights.

Abstract:

The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (the CPT) is charged with 'examin[ing] the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty with a view to strengthening, if necessary, the protection of such persons from torture and from inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'. This it does through establishing an 'on-going dialogue' with state parties, based upon visits to places of detention and thereafter conducted largely in the form of reports to state authorities which prompt interim and follow-up state responses. The CPT's mandate covers some 200 million Europeans who have been deprived of their liberty . This mandate is set to grow with the entry into force of Protocol No 1 and the accession of new member states of the Council of Europe in the near future. The CPT is now in its second decade of operations. Earlier concerns - above all, the need to secure state co-operation and the desire to establish external credibility - are no longer apparent. A new self-confidence is obvious, marked by an obvious willingness to re-examine working methods and even welcome an attempt to open the question whether confidentiality may now be relaxed. Most of the Committee's routine work focuses upon prisons and police stations. The 2001 report indeed took the opportunity of clarifying and expanding upon earlier general statements of expectations concerning imprisonment, much of which is influenced by the effects of high rates of incarceration in eastern Europe. However, on occasion, the CPT faces the task of addressing situations of considerable political tension in which there is a real risk of serious ill-treatment and even of loss of life. Turkey and the Russian Federation again in 2001 provided much of this higher-order drama. Along the corridor from the CPT's offices in Strasbourg, some cautious advances in Court jurisprudence on Article 3 was evident, but there is still considerable distance in the approach adopted by these two human rights bodies of the Council of Europe.