MONITORING PLACES OF DETENTION : A PRACTICAL GUIDE 2 136 “In all detention facilities juveniles should be separated from adults, unless they are members of the same family. Under controlled conditions, juveniles may be brought together with carefully selected adults as part of a special programme that has been shown to be beneficial for the juveniles concerned.” RPJDL, Rule 29. Comments The principle governing separation of detainees is protection, as well as recognition of the specific needs or status of different categories. Detainees should not be separated for reasons that are not governed by this principle. Detainees are normally separated according to: ■ sex and age: men from women and minors from adults; ■ judicial or legal situation: charged or sentenced. The visiting mechanism should examine detention conditions from the point of view of protection and special need. Separation should be based on an objective assessment of the risk for the detainee. Detainees should have the opportunity to request separation where there are genuine protection issues. Some detainees may need to be separated because of specific threats to their safety from other detainees, for example for reasons of ethnic origin, religious belief, sexual orientation. Mechanisms should beware of separation having a disadvantageous impact on different categories of detainees. For example, because women and juveniles form a minority in the overall prison population, providing them with separate facilities often results in deprivation of contact with family and friends. Prisoners awaiting trial are often, despite their legal status of presumed innocence, kept in poorer conditions and with less access to the outer world than those who have been convicted. There is no medical justification for segregating detainees only on the grounds that they are HIV-positive.