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English Language Page The list of the representatives of these organizations is enclosed in the annex. The primary purpose of the mission was to monitor the respect for the human rights of the persons placed involuntarily in state institutions. The bases of the monitoring were the international standards for the treatment of prisoners and the international standards for the treatment of mentally ill and mentally disabled. In Macedonia the mission concentrated on three types of institutions: One of the major assumptions of the project partners is that openness of the detention facilities to domestic and international scrutiny by human rights NGOs and other civil society groups is a basic safeguard against ill treatment and other human rights violations. A number of international organizations recently came up with recommendations, encouraging countries to allow visits by human rights NGOs to places of detention. [Among them is the OSCE (Cf. Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Prison Reform, Vienna, 8-9 July 2002)] The legislation of Macedonia does not provide explicitly for the possibility of the human rights NGOs to carry out monitoring missions in the places of detention. The Macedonian authorities however usually allow such visits. The IHF has already had a chance to visit some places of detention in Macedonia in May 2002. These included the prison in Idrizovo and the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in Bardovci, near Skopje. [See: IHF, Report on the Fact Finding Mission to Macedonia 27-28 May 2002, available at: www.ihf-hr.org] The IHF delegation formed three monitoring teams with 4-5 persons in each. These teams visited up to 2 facilities a day. They received different degrees of cooperation of the administrations of the respective detention facilities, which reflected on the efforts required to conduct an appropriate inspection and on the quality of the results. Almost half of the members of the IHF delegation could speak languages in which they could establish some communication with the administration and with the inmates of the institutions. The other members were assisted with interpreters provided by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in the Republic of Macedonia. The IHF delegation always insisted on the possibility to conduct private interviews with the inmates of the facilities visited. Unfortunately, this was not always possible for a variety of reasons. Macedonian legislation, just as the laws of many other countries, does not allow for contacts of remand prisoners with private groups, even for the purposes of human rights monitoring. These regulations do not have any rational basis whatsoever and are a remnant of an old and outdated approach to custody. Thus, the IHF teams were not able to conduct private interviews with remand prisoners. In several establishments the directors and the other members of the staff tried to control the team’s visit and did their best to divert it from its course or to prevent private conversations with any inmates. An additional obstacle to the delegation’s mission was the incompetence of some of the staff members, who were not able to supply the necessary data or were not aware of the legal provisions on which they were supposed to base their actions. Despite these difficulties, the IHF delegation was able to conduct meaningful research and to come up with important recommendations on both individual facilities and the system as a whole. Its observations and recommendations could serve as a point of departure for future monitoring activities of groups concerned with the human rights of the persons placed involuntarily in the Macedonian state institutions. |
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