SLP 11 (2016)

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 In some cases, the Subcommittee even achieved the closure of outdated detention facilities.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.

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