A/64/215 42. Moreover, in many countries pretrial detainees are held together with convicted prisoners, and prison guards, prosecutors and judges treat them as criminals, in flagrant violation of the right of accused persons to be presumed innocent until convicted by a competent, impartial and independent court. The Special Rapporteur has interviewed many detainees who did not know whether they had already been sentenced or not. The prison guards did not know either. It simply does not matter, as the decision of the prosecutor to charge persons for a crime and send them to pretrial detention is already widely regarded as a “sentence”. After pretrial detainees have spent several years in pretrial detention without access to a lawyer or a court, judges may finally sentence them to imprisonment simply to justify the time they have already spent in police custody and pretrial detention. 3 43. The Special Rapporteur notes that one of his more surprising observations from his fact-finding missions to many countries in different regions of the world is that police and prison authorities simply do not regard it as their responsibility to provide detainees with the most basic services necessary for survival, let alone for a dignified existence or what human rights instruments call an “adequate standard of living”, i.e., food, water, clothing, a toilet and a proper place to sleep. A few examples from fact finding missions by the Special Rapporteur illustrate this point. In Equatorial Guinea, detainees spend several weeks or even months in overcrowded, often dark and filthy police cells with virtually nothing but a concrete floor where they are kept for 24 hours a day. It is the task of their families to bring them water in plastic bottles and food in plastic bags. Since there are no toilets, they must use the same bottles to urinate and the plastic bags to defecate. In most police stations, including the police headquarters in Malabo, plenty of filled and stinking plastic bottles and bags had been thrown through the bars to the corridors and open yards. Some cells were so overcrowded that there was no space for everyone to sleep at the same time. Sleeping in shifts owing to a lack of space is common in many of the police stations and pretrial detention facilities the Special Rapporteur visited, including in Georgia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Togo and the Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova. In Indonesia and Paraguay, detainees are not only deprived of basic services, such as food and medicine; in some cases, they even have to pay a daily fee for the very fact that they are “accommodated” in a cell. If detainees are poor or have no families in the vicinity to provide them with food or money, they depend on richer detainees who might demand slavery-like services in exchange. 44. In the police headquarters of Lagos, Nigeria, the Special Rapporteur found more than 100 detainees, including women and children, in the so-called “torture room” of the Criminal Investigation Department, where they were routinely subjected to severe methods of torture in the presence of other detainees, including gunshots into their legs from a short distance, and then left with serious injuries without any medical treatment. According to the judgement of the forensic doctor who accompanied the Special Rapporteur, some of the victims were going to die unless their legs were immediately amputated. In Mongolia, long-term prisoners are kept in strict solitary confinement for up to 30 years, and most of those interviewed by the Special Rapporteur in these maximum security cells were in a state of mind that no longer allowed for any meaningful interaction. Prisoners sentenced to death __________________ 3 10 See, for example, A/HRC/7/3/Add.4, paras. 51 and 52; see also reports of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, for example, E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 75, and A/HRC/4/40, paras. 68 and 69. 09-43792