United Nations Human Rights Website - Treaty Bodies Database - Document - Sessional/Annual Report of Committee - (f) The Committee should be given information on all the individual cases raised during the presentation of the second report on the basis of allegations by human rights organizations. D. Uruguay 81. The Committee considered the second periodic report of Uruguay (CAT/C/17/Add.16) at its 274th and 275th meetings, held on 19 November 1996 (see CAT/C/SR.274 and 275), and adopted the following conclusions and recommendations. 1. Introduction 82. The members of the Committee welcome the presentation of the second periodic report by the delegation of Uruguay and note that Uruguay was one of the first countries to ratify the Convention, that it has not made any reservations and that it has recognized the optional procedures set forth in articles 20, 21 and 22 of the Convention. 83. Uruguay is also a party to the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture. 84. The Committee welcomes the fact that the Uruguayan delegation included representatives of the executive and the judiciary and that the report was prepared with the participation of official institutions such as the Supreme Court of Justice, the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as non-governmental organizations such as Service Peace and Justice and the Institute for Legal and Social Studies of Uruguay, which enjoy well-deserved prestige in the area of the protection and promotion of human rights. In the Committee's view, such cooperation clearly shows that the eradication of the practice of torture has been elevated to the level of national policy that must be pursued by the authorities and society as a whole. 2. Positive aspects 85. The report describes a series of measures that attest to the authorities' concern to achieve the maximum harmonization of legislation and administrative procedures with the requirements of the Convention. 86. Among those measures are the bills on crimes against humanity, on the establishment of courts of enforcement and supervision and on the parliamentary commission set up to examine issues relating to prisons. 87. The Committee also appreciates the establishment of the Honorary National Commission for the Amendment of the Code of Penal Procedure, through Act No. 15,844 of 1990, and of the Honorary Commission on the improvement of the prison system, through Act No. 16,707 of July 1995. 88. The establishment of a working group on the national prison system, made up of representatives of the non-governmental organizations listed in paragraph 23 of the second periodic report, which is developing a programme of systematic visits to penal institutions, is in the Committee's view worthy of being held up as an example. Some of the proposals formulated by the working group from a multihttp://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/de75e94f920bd0a0802565a600537744?Opendocument (19 of 109)16/10/2006 9:54:12 AM