MONITORING PLACES OF DETENTION : A PRACTICAL GUIDE 7 EDITOR’S NOTE For over a quarter of a century, the Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT) has defended the simple but novel idea proposed by its founder Jean-Jacques Gautier, that visits to places where people are deprived of their liberty is one of the most effective ways of preventing torture and ill-treatment. The APT continues to promote this idea both at the international and the national level. The APT was actively involved in the drafting of international instruments based on preventive visits to places of detention. The organization was thus at the origin of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture (1987) as well as the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture adopted on 18 December 2002 (OPCAT). The OPCAT is particularly innovative as it is based on the complementarity of preventive visits by an international organ and by “one or several national preventive mechanisms” that State Parties must set up after ratification. This “twopillar” approach reflects that of APT, which has for several years encouraged monitoring of places of detention at the national level. It is in this context that the APT developed, in 2000, a joint project with ODIHR on “Encouraging national NGOs to monitor places of detention”. This project resulted in a joint publication entitled “Monitoring places of detention: a practical guide for NGOs”, published in December 2002 in English and in September 2003 in Russian. The joint guide was written by Annette Corbaz, a consultant for the APT who has more than ten years’ experience of visiting places of detention with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Our new guide is an adaptation of this previous version, in order to include elements of the newly adopted OPCAT and broaden the target audience to any person or body entitled to carry out visits to places of