The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) is organising a conference in Strasbourg on 4 November to mark its 30th anniversary and to discuss the implementation of detention safeguards in the first hours of police custody, a time when the risk of ill-treatment is higher. The conference is co-organised by the Association for the Prevention of Torture.
The conference will bring together CPT members, human rights experts and representatives of national prevention mechanisms. Preventing police torture and other forms of ill-treatment was one of the topics addressed by the CPT in its annual report for 2018.
The conference will be followed by a ceremony with the participation of Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić, Ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattei representing the French Presidency of the Committee of Ministers, Parliamentary Assembly President Liliane Maury Pasquier , President of the European Court of Human Rights Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos, Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović, CPT President Mykola Gnatovskyy, President of the Conference of INGOs Anna Rurka, and President of the Association for the Prevention of Torture Martine Brunschwig-Graf.
The CPT was set up under the Council of Europe’s “European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which came into force in 1989 and has been ratified by all the 47 member States of the Council of Europe.
During the last three decades the CPT has organised 451 visits to Member States to assess how persons deprived of their liberty are treated in places such as prisons, juvenile detention centres, police stations, holding centres for immigration detainees, psychiatric hospitals, social care homes, etc. By October 2019, the CPT had published 405 reports containing its findings and recommendations.
The conference will start at 2 p.m. and end at 5.30 p.m. (Hemicycle, Palais de l’Europe). The ceremony will start at 6 p.m. and end at 7.30 p.m.
The event will be webcast live on the CPT’s website.
