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decide whether detained persons should receive urgent medical treatment if the detained
persons themselves do not request it (art. 2).
13.
The State party should:
(a)
Guarantee that all detained persons are afforded, in law and in practice,
all fundamental legal safeguards from the very outset of their deprivation of liberty,
including the right to be informed immediately of the charges against them; to have
prompt access to a lawyer or to free legal aid during all proceedings; to receive free
interpretation services; to be able to notify a relative or another person of their choice
about their detention or arrest; to request and receive a medical examination by an
independent doctor upon their deprivation of liberty, including by an independent
doctor of their choice upon request; and to have their deprivation of liberty recorded
at all stages, including transfers to different facilities, in registers that are accessible to
their family members and lawyers;
(b)
Ensure that there is mandatory and systematic medical oversight of
police detention and interrogation, including with respect to staffing, equipment and
medication, and that police station commanders are automatically informed about
allegations of torture, take the necessary action and ensure that the medical
practitioner’s report is sent to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate; the
State party should also compile statistical data on the number of cases identified
through the Directorate, and detailed information on the outcome of investigations
concerning these cases;
(c)
Systematically monitor compliance by all public officials with the
fundamental legal safeguards, penalize any failure on the part of officials to comply
and inform the Committee in its next periodic report about the results of the
monitoring of compliance of public officials with fundamental legal safeguards;
(d)
Provide information on the complaints received regarding failure to
respect fundamental legal safeguards, including the number of complaints received,
and on their outcome.
Prolonged pretrial detention
14.
The Committee is concerned about the persistence of recourse to pretrial detention
in the State party, which may not be monitored regularly by a judge and is often prolonged
owing to congestion in the judicial case flow, and about the absence of information on
whether pretrial detention, which significantly contributes to overcrowding in places of
detention, is taken into account in all cases when the serving of the final sentence is
calculated (arts. 2, 11 and 16).
15.
The State party should:
(a)
Take all measures necessary to ensure that pretrial detention, in
particular of children, is reduced to the extent possible, is exceptional, is appropriately
regulated in law and is closely monitored by courts;
(b)
Ensure that time spent in pretrial detention is taken into account when
calculating the time to be served under the final sentence and is carried out in keeping
with the provisions of the Convention and of the Guidelines on the Conditions of
Arrest, Police Custody and Pre-trial Detention in Africa;
(c)
Facilitate the work of judicial case-flow management committees and
envisage using alternatives to remand detention, as laid out in the United Nations
Standard Minimum Rules for Non-custodial Measures (the Tokyo Rules), the
Guidelines on the Conditions of Arrest, Police Custody and Pre-trial Detention in
Africa and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of
Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules);
(d)
Adopt the measures, including in terms of training for judges, necessary
to promote the use of alternatives to pretrial detention, in accordance with
international standards.
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