E/CN.4/1997/7/Add.3 page 13 be activated in cases of injury, which is considered to be a most serious offence, in addition to the criminal proceedings which the prosecutor may initiate if there are good reasons to believe an offence has been committed. The procedure may be initiated either on a personal complaint or ex officio . The Director also said that instructions concerning the treatment of detainees are issued regularly in order to establish controls and that training courses have been given in matters relating to human rights. The new rules of procedure also establish the post of Commissioner for Human Rights and the Police, one of whose functions, according to rule 92 (1), is to receive complaints by individuals regarding actions by the police that constitute human rights violations or corrupt practices, and to bring those complaints before the authorities of the Metropolitan Police, for the appropriate remedial measures and disciplinary sanctions to be applied. If the investigation reveals that an offence has been committed, the Commissioner refers the proceedings to the Attorney-General. 41. Although the Special Rapporteur asked each of the police forces for detailed statistical information to obtain an idea of how many officials had been punished for ill-treatment of detainees and what types of sanction had been applied, the information was either not supplied or supplied in an incomplete form. 42. The President of the Supreme Court said that a judge who receives a complaint against a police body might easily be intimidated by the esprit de corps of the police and fail to process the complaint. It might help judges to feel more secure if they felt that the police was genuinely interested in purging itself. Judges often do not have that feeling, however. B. Ordinary criminal legislation 43. Article 60, paragraph 3 of the Constitution stipulates: “No one may be held incommunicado or subjected to torture or to other proceedings which cause physical or mental suffering. Any physical or moral attack inflicted on a person subjected to restriction of his liberty shall be punishable”. Article 182 of the Penal Code stipulates that: “any suffering, offences against human dignity, harassment, torture or physical or moral attacks inflicted on a detained person, by his jailers or warders or by anyone who ordered such acts, in violation of the individual rights recognized in article 60, paragraph 3 of the Constitution, shall be liable to a prison term of three to six years”. 44. The Special Rapporteur was told that article 182 was being interpreted in such a way as to restrict its application to situations arising in prisons. In all other cases torture or ill-treatment is considered by the judiciary to come under the offence of injury (slight or serious), which in the Special Rapporteur's opinion is completely inappropriate. In the first place, because infliction of torture is an offence that must be prosecuted in itself, independently of the physical harm caused to the victim. There are, for example, methods of torture that leave no physical after-effects but are no less effective for the torturer's purposes. When the acts are characterized as “slight injuries”, moreover, the offence carries a very short statute of limitation, or period of prescription, which, given the deficiencies in the