E/CN.4/1997/7/Add.3 page 6 already cooperated. The Minister of Justice, for his part, expressed the view that, rather than being part of the PTJ, the Institute of Forensic Medicine should be an independent body attached to the Ministry of Justice. 12. Non-governmental sources also expressed dissatisfaction with the role played in many cases by the representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, whose functions, in accordance with article 83 et seq. of the Code of Criminal Procedure and article 6 of the Organization Act relating to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, include supervising the pre-trial steps taken by the judicial police; investigating arbitrary detentions and promoting steps to end them; encouraging the exercise of public freedoms and supervising the activities of the police forces; ensuring respect for the human and constitutional rights of adults and minors detained in police stations, places of detention, military detention centres, labour colonies, prisons and penitentiaries, reform schools and all other detention and internment establishments; supervising inmates' and internees' conditions of detention, and taking appropriate legal steps to enforce human rights when it is established that they have been or are being impaired or violated. The law also provides for the Public Prosecutor's powers to include access to all of the above-mentioned establishments. They said that the Public Prosecutor’s Office is poorly represented or non-existent in remote areas of the country and that, although some prosecutors are indeed negligent in monitoring the actions of the police, occasionally out of fear of reprisals, the problem is also one of lack of personnel, which was confirmed by the Attorney-General's Office. The same sources also stated that the latter should exercise greater control over the public prosecutors' work. On this point the representatives of the Attorney-General's Office told the Special Rapporteur that the Office included a department of inspection and control and that internal administrative proceedings were instituted in cases of negligence. 13. Non-governmental sources also stated that the police forces do not always provide prosecutors with the information they request, which was confirmed by the representatives of the Attorney-General's Office. The latter said that they could not monitor all the actions of the police bodies, but that they did have access to the daily list of prison admissions, which has to give the detainee's identity and the cause and date of the detention, which enables the Public Prosecutor’s Office to verify the deadline for pre-trial detention. Two types of obstacles, however, were often encountered, the first regarding police officers under investigation, and the second regarding judges. They said that, despite the fact that the Public Prosecutor’s Office had a right of access to police premises, such access was sometimes hampered by the police themselves, and they mentioned cases in which representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office had been threatened while inspecting reports of irregularities in certain police stations. They also said that judges occasionally failed to carry out the appropriate proceedings out of fear or on account of some sort of prior commitment (political or otherwise), so that the prosecutor's work was held up by delaying tactics. Alternatively, the judges limited prosecutors’ access to files or restricted their right to interrogate defendants. 14. Torture victims are frequently reluctant to lodge a complaint, either because they have been threatened with subsequent reprisals, because they mistrust the judicial system and doubt whether their complaint will lead to the punishment of those responsible, given the deficiencies in the functioning