The Council of Europe continues to support Kosovo* in preventing torture and ill-treatment in prisons and other closed institutions.  

Following the development of protocols on documenting and reporting ill-treatment and relevant tools, including the incident report and the checklist of injuries, a three-day training was held on 4-6 November 2024 for over 40 participants from the Prison Health Department of the Ministry of Health, Kosovo Correctional Services, Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, Special Institute for Persons with Physical and Mental Disabilities, and the prison inspectorate.

The training was co-facilitated by two Council of Europe consultants and allowed operational and technical staff from the abovementioned institutions to increase their awareness and understanding of the Istanbul Protocol on the effective investigation into and documentation of torture and ill-treatment and the accompanying tools, whilst combining it with the work on practical case scenarios and sessions on how to fill out check lists and compile incident reports, thus enhancing their skills on the application of the protocols and their tools in practice.

The training was also attended by the Head of the National Preventive Mechanism of the Ombudsperson Institution of Kosovo, as well as representatives of the civil society and the European Union Rule of Law Mission to Kosovo (EULEX), who had the opportunity to present their roles and work carried out in relation to the Istanbul Protocol, thus ensuring that the training participants have a comprehensive picture of the main actors involved in preventing, fighting and reporting torture and ill-treatment in prisons and other closed institutions in Kosovo.

As most project activities, the event was designed to contribute towards improvement of inter-institutional cooperation between the project partners and beneficiaries.

The training was organised under the auspices of the Council of Europe project “Improvement of the treatment of persons deprived of liberty”.