Today, we have a brilliant opportunity to apply to a person, who played an important role in torture prevention in France and – more generally – in Europe.

I am very pleased to have a conversation with Vincent Delbos, honorary magistrate and a former member of France’s Contrôleur général des Lieux de Privation de Liberté (2008-2014).

Currently, Mr. Vincent Delbos is a member of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture elected in respect of France.

Dmytro Yagunov: Dear Mr. Delbos, first, I would like to express my sincerest thanks to you for this great opportunity to receive knowledge about the French experience in preventing torture. Which way has the French national system of prevention of torture developed in?

Vincent Delbos: In France, as in other countries, the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and its additional protocol, the OPCAT, are at the root of the Contrôleur général des lieux de privation de liberté.

Since France signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention (OPCAT) in 2005, it must set up an independent national mechanism for the prevention of torture, tasked with examining the situation of persons deprived of their liberty, making recommendations to the competent authorities and submitting proposals for legislative amendments.

However, the principle of an independent public oversight body has a specific history in France. A public report, the Canivet Report (the former First President of the Court of Cassation) of 6 March 2000, focused on improving external control of prisons. The report was based on the issue of “how to ensure both the investigation of and response to individual requests from detainees and the general monitoring of conditions of detention“. It set out several observations that led to the need for independent monitoring: 

Between 2001 and 2004, an opinion from the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights and several civil society proposals and bills called for the creation of an independent external monitoring body for prisons.

In 2006, the Estates General on Prison Conditions in France were followed by three worrying reports on prison conditions, including one of the first visit reports by the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, who was deeply concerned about “effective respect for human rights in France”.

The Contrôleur général des lieux de privation de liberté was created by the Act of 30 October 2007, making it an “independent authority“.

Dmytro Yagunov: What are main characteristics of the French national system of prevention of torture?

Vincent Delbos: What makes France special is that it has set up an autonomous authority with exclusive responsibility for the tasks assigned to an NPM. It did not start out as an ombudsman.

The Comptroller General is appointed for a non-renewable term of 6 years after a hearing by Parliament. He receives no instructions from any authority and may not be prosecuted for opinions he expresses or acts he performs. He may not be dismissed and is bound by professional secrecy, as are his staff, regarding any facts, acts or information of which they are aware.

The scope of its remit is very broad, covering more than 5,000 places where people are deprived of their liberty in France, including overseas territories. This means more than 180 prisons, almost 400 health establishments (care without consent), around 4,000 police custody facilities (police and gendarmerie), 182 court depots and waiting areas before people appear before a prosecutor or judge, 56 administrative detention centres and facilities and 51 waiting areas (immigration detention centres). To these must be added 44 closed educational centres for delinquent children, as well as customs holding facilities and transfer vehicles.

The law does not set out a precise list of places, since it covers any place where a person is deprived of his or her liberty by a public authority. The sphere of confinement could be extended without changing the law.

Dmytro Yagunov: Which functions are imposed on the CGLPL?

Vincent Delbos: The mission is to ensure that fundamental rights are respected and to prevent infringements by three types of means.

Firstly, referrals to and investigations by the CGLPL enable any person, victim or witness, to alert the CGLPL to a situation where fundamental rights are being violated.

They also enable this authority to obtain information on the operation of the facilities in question. Finally, they provide opportunities to remedy breaches of fundamental rights.

As part of the team, controllers are in charge of handling confidential letters sent by persons deprived of their liberty, their relatives or any other person. They can conduct investigations and, under the authority of the Controller General, publish the findings. 3,000 letters are received each year, most of them concerning detainees. Of these, 30% concern access to healthcare, 20% concern physical integrity and 12% concern dignity.

Secondly, as provided for by law, the core of our activity is based on visits to places where people are deprived of their liberty. This involves on-site checks on the living conditions of persons deprived of their liberty and the working conditions of staff, and therefore the effectiveness of the exercise of fundamental rights. These inspections must also focus on the condition, organisation and operation of the establishments.

For example, many visits highlighted the lack of waste treatment.

The visit process is based on a series of stages, starting with the Contrôleur général’s decision on the location of the visit (unannounced visit or scheduled visit). A team of inspectors is appointed to carry out the on-site visit. On its return, the team draws up a report on its findings, which is sent to the ministers, who may make observations. Finally, all the reports are made public on the www.cglpl.fr website or in the Journal Officiel if recommendations are made as a matter of urgency or of importance for fundamental rights.

Finally, because of his independence, the Contrôleur des Lieux de Privation de liberté is a fundamental rights watchdog. It is the soul of this authority.  In practical terms, this implies a presence in the public debate through the publication in the Official Journal of specific recommendations and cross-cutting thematic opinions. It also means influencing government by proposing changes to laws and regulations. In recent years, it has also issued opinions on horizontal issues such as access to education for minors in detention, care for transgender people in places of detention, defence in places of detention and a major opinion on prison overcrowding and regulation.

Lastly, the submission of a public annual report to the President of the Republic has always provided an opportunity to inform the public about the state of places of deprivation of liberty, the recommendations made to the public authorities and the extent to which they have been implemented.

From the very first visits by the CGLPL, the legitimacy of an external and independent control was established. Starting with a meeting in Paris at the beginning of September 2008, chaired by Jean Marie Delarue, the first Contrôleur général, around thirty people, including doctors, prison officers, a police officer and a gendarme, lawyers, judges and prosecutors, volunteers from associations, a hospital director, a chaplain and a Protestant pastor, met in the René Cassin room, the inspiration for the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Gathered in the René Cassin room, the inspiration for the European Convention on Human Rights and its article 3, they identified four major guidelines defining the course of action.

The mission entrusted to the CGLPL is ethnographic in nature: to describe as closely as possible, without misrepresenting, the living conditions in places of deprivation of liberty for prisoners and the staff who work there.

Fundamental rights are a dynamic concept that can and must be enriched.

Dmytro Yagunov: Which legal instruments does the CGLPL have?

Vincent Delbos: As regards the powers of the CGLPL, nothing can stand in the way of a visit by the CGLPL, and the powers intended by the legislator must all be used to the full, within the limits of medical confidentiality, national defence confidentiality and legal proceedings.

Lastly, the work of the CGLPL must bring a long-term perspective on the deprivation of liberty into the public debate, because the value of a democracy is measured by the conditions of captivity.

When the CGLPL was launched, important methodological elements were put in place: verifying the effectiveness of rights, going behind appearances, not carrying out conformity checks, believing only what is verified, talking in conditions of confidentiality, taking the necessary time. This approach is akin to “living in captivity like a fish in water”, by staying as long as necessary, usually a week.

This strategy is based on a bottom-up approach. The way to ensure that rights are effective is to move from findings on the ground to recommendations based on those findings.

Unlike inspectorates, which check compliance with the rules in force by holding hearings, the Contrôleur Général, like the CPT, conducts confidential interviews.

From mid-September 2008, inspectors from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences have been criss-crossing France’s prisons, both in mainland France and overseas. In all, some two thousand places of deprivation of liberty have been visited at least once, and sometimes several times, over the fifteen years or so that they have been in operation, although this is less than half of the number recorded.

Dmytro Yagunov: What evolution did the Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty have?

Vincent Delbos: One of the first visits took place in a detention centre for foreign nationals, some one hundred kilometres west of Paris, difficult to reach by public transport, in the middle of a police academy. Armed police officers circulate in the holding area, where mobile phones are not allowed. A description of the care, catering and family reception area, with its fenced courtyard. This description was taken up by the Strasbourg Court in the Popov v. France ruling, which condemned the detention of families with children.

Finally, since this period of installation in the institutional landscape, two new Contrôleuses Générales have been successively appointed for non-renewable six-year terms, who have acted with continuity but also with a form of change. Under the first mandate, from 2008 to 2014, all of the French Republic’s prisons, with two or three exceptions, were audited by Jean Marie Delarue and his teams.

Her successor, Adeline Hazan, carried out second visits between 2014 and 2020, continuing this essential monitoring of places of detention, but she also endeavoured to step up surveillance and vigilance in health establishments where people are hospitalised without their consent, by highlighting patients’ rights when they are placed in isolation or on the use of restraint, as a reminder that the law applies in all circumstances when assessing the proportionality of such measures.

The current Comptroller General, Dominique Simonnot, who will be appointed at the end of the pandemic in 2020, is tireless in her criticism of the violation of dignity resulting from overcrowding in prisons. With solutions such as prison regulation, which consists of limiting the number of prisoners in relation to the number of places in a prison. It’s a long-term project.

The spirit of the national prevention mechanisms is prevention. From this point of view, we can consider that there is a form of equation that has quickly become an axiom: the hyperdependence between respect for rights and the working conditions of staff. The prevention mission of a body such as the CGLPL finds its meaning in similar attention to these two terms.

Another fundamental dimension is cooperation, by guaranteeing the confidentiality of exchanges, with detainees, but also with professionals and the authorities. By being particularly vigilant to ensure that those who speak out are not subjected to reprisals.

It also cooperates with monitoring bodies such as the CPT, whose mandate is diplomatic in nature, since it is addressed to States, but which implies a relationship of trust with national preventive mechanisms. From the outset, a form of complementarity has been established between the CGLPL and the CPT, in strict compliance with each other’s mandates. This is reflected in the presence and systematic hearing of the Contrôleur général during each visit to France. It also means that some of the Committee’s recommendations are followed up. For example, during an inspection in Marseille in 2012 by the CGLPL, the recommendations made by the CGLPL as a matter of urgency expressly referred to the CPT’s recommendations, noting that nothing had been done to change an undignified situation[1].

Respect for the dignity of people, whatever their situation, is the common mandate of the monitoring bodies. It is intangible and it is up to us, through intense cooperation, to prove Chekhov wrong: “I think of the word pariah and what it means: human condition below which it is impossible to fall“[2].

Dmytro Yagunov: Dear Mr. Delbos, I was happy to receive so deep explanation of the French national system of prevention of torture in places of detention. I am more than sure that sharing this brilliant explanation of the French experience will be interesting for many practitioners in many countries. Thank you very much!

[1] http://www.cglpl.fr/2012/recommandations-en-urgence-du-12-novembre-2012-relatives-au-centre-penitentiaire-des-baumettes-a-marseille/

[2] Chekhov, Anton (1893). Sakhalin Island.