discrepancies between injuries could be partly because of the errors in description of injuries made by
police officers. For instance, the administrative arrest protocol does not contain a column where a
police officer should indicate injuries found on the body of an arrested person. This leads to establishing
uneven standards. Some police officers enter the description of injuries in the deletion protocol under
the comment section and some do not. Discrepancies between the records could also be partly caused
by the practice of superficial examination. In particular, police officers carry out superficial
examinations and do not do full body examinations as it is done in isolators.
The Special Preventive Group finds those cases particularly suspicious where the individual brought to
a TDI has injuries in the facial area and the police officer indicates in the detention protocol that the
arrested person has no injuries. There are 19 such cases out of 508 incidents examined by the Special
Preventive Group in 2018.134 Similarly, there were 45 incidents135 identified where, unlike the entries
made in TDIs, the detention protocol had no reference to injuries in the facial area. It is clear that if a
person had an injury during arrest, police officers should have noticed it and enter it into the detention
protocol. Accordingly, the Special Preventive Group considers that it is necessary on the one hand to
add a column to the protocol of administrative detention in which description of body injuries will be
described and on the other hand to instruct police officers in express terms to document body injuries
identified.
3.2. SAFEGUARDS AGAINST TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT
In order to prevent ill-treatment on the part of law-enforcement authorities, it is important to ensure
at legislative level that arrested persons have minimum legal safeguards. Under Georgian legislation,
minimum legal safeguards are provided for arrested persons such as: the right to receive information
about the reasons of arrest and procedural rights in the language understandable for the arrested person;
the right to have a legal representative, access to medical care and the right to inform family/relative
about arrest. These are safeguards against torture and other ill-treatment. There are also safeguards
such as: the duty to register each arrested person brought to police stations, the duty to bring an arrested
person before the court, to maintain audio and video recordings, among them, the process of
interrogation of arrested persons, etc.
At the same time, it is equally important to ensure that arrested persons are able to practically exercise
their rights established by legislation. Below is given our assessment as to how these rights are realised
in practice:
134
Out of these 19 cases, in 15 cases a person was arrested in administrative proceedings and in four cases – in
criminal proceedings.
135 Out of these 45 cases, a person was arrested in administrative proceedings.
52
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