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to visit any place under the jurisdiction and control of the State party where persons
are or may be deprived of their liberty (the above mentioned detention facilities), and
to cooperate with the national preventive mechanisms and with other international
mechanisms, with a unifying objective to strengthen the prevention of torture and ill-
treatment, and reinforce the rights of persons deprived of their liberty. He claims that
the protocol defines in some detail the mandate of the Subcommittee, however the
response to a number of significant related issues derives only from its practice. He also
claims that the visits have already resulted in adoption or changes of laws or internal
regulations as well as changes in practice that contributed to the strengthening of the
legal safeguards for persons deprived of their liberty. In some cases, the Subcommittee
even achieved the closure of outdated detention facilities. Based on the findings of
the Czech Public Defender of Rights,
Marie Lukasová
identifies several kinds of
failures in protection against ill-treatment and claims that the type of deprivation of
liberty partly determines the nature of ill-treatment, and she considers how to handle
those findings. The article introduces several examples of follow-up activities of the
Defender, aiming to achieve the prevention of ill-treatment by tools different from the
monitoring. She claims that special attention needs to be paid to the role of doctor and
judge.
Petr Šustek
discusses selected aspects of the provision of health services in the
Czech Republic and identifies the most controversial practices of the contemporary
Czech healthcare system, such as the use of means of restraint, particularly net-beds,
inadequate supervision of the security of patients under restraints, and the use of
surgical castration in the context of the treatment of sex offenders. He analyses these
cases within the prism of the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights.
The
fourth and last chapter
is comprised of two articles focusing on the practice
within the Council of Europe States Parties.
Alla Tymofeyeva
elaborates on the
relationship between the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and the
European Court of Human Rights. She focuses on the references to CPT’s documents
in the Court’s case-law.
Viktor Kundrák
and
Petr Konůpka
focus on two recent
judgments of the European Court of Human Rights against the Czech Republic where
there was found a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights
in its substantive and procedural aspects. In both cases the applicants were subjected
to inhuman or degrading treatment during their deprivation of liberty. The authors
discuss the practical use of criminal law in the fight against ill-treatment and propose
possible solutions to the identified lacunas.