GENEVA (29 November 2023) – The UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture has added the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Greece, Honduras and Nigeria to its programme of visits for 2024, in addition to the previously announced visits to Albania, Bolivia, Gabon and Mongolia.

The Subcommittee has been to Croatia, Georgia, Guatemala, and the State of Palestine in the past few months to examine places of deprivation of liberty and evaluate these State parties’ torture prevention measures. Another SPT delegation will embark on its mission to the Philippines this week, completing the SPT’s 2023 programme of visits according to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT).

The new visit plan was made during the SPT’s latest confidential session in November in Geneva. The Subcommittee also adopted the report on its visit to South Africa in March 2023. It also took stock of several recent other relevant events, such as the publication, by States parties, of SPT’s visits reports.

“We are pleased that Liberia made public the SPT reports regarding our visits in 2010 and 2018,” said Chairperson Suzanne Jabbour, adding that “these reports contribute positively to the prevention of torture and ill-treatment in the country and show transparency in the measures to be implemented and followed up.”

The SPT also engaged with the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) during its annual meeting in Copenhagen. “The SPT values its ongoing dialogue with the GANHRI as many of these institutions also operate as torture monitoring bodies, officially called National Preventive Mechanisms, in their own countries. We see this engagement as a unique opportunity to enhance these mechanisms’ functional independence and effectiveness,” Jabbour said.

In addition, the SPT decided to add Afghanistan, which ratified the OPCAT in 2018, to the list of States parties that are significantly overdue in establishing their national preventive mechanisms (NPM) and are therefore not in compliance with Article 17 of the Optional Protocol. Other States parties on the “Article 17 list” are Belize, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Liberia, Nauru, Nigeria, the Philippines, South Sudan and the State of Palestine.

Under the Optional Protocol, States are obliged to establish their NPM within one year of ratification. More than 70 countries have established NPMs, out of the 93 States parties that have ratified the Optional Protocol.

During its session, the SPT continued to work on a revised draft of its first general comment on the definition of places of deprivation of liberty, following the public consultation.

ENDS