Methodology of visits 1. Methodology of visits External difficulties in exercising the NPM mandate had an impact on the methodology of operations adopted by the Mechanism. Starting from November 2010, the employees of the National Preventive Mechanism carried out the visits only to a limited extent.22 This was due to a definite statement by the Inspector General for Personal Data Protection (GIODO), saying that the provisions of the Act on the Human Rights Defender in place at that time guaranteed no right of access to sensitive data. Work on amending the Act on the Human Rights Defender began immediately, at the initiative of the Human Rights Defender. Its aim was to create an appropriate legal basis for performing the tasks of the National Preventive Mechanism, imposed on the Republic of Poland by OPCAT, and also to regulate the admissibility of processing personal data. Before the relevant statutory amendments were introduced, the employees of the National Preventive Mechanism had performed their tasks without having access to sensitive personal data. Nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals were included in the schedule of visits in 2011. Nevertheless, their specific characteristics and the experience of the National Preventive Mechanism with such establishments led to the conclusion that a thorough and reliable verification of the observance of rights and freedoms of persons staying there was not possible without legal access to personal data, including sensitive ones. Visits to nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals that are reduced in their scope, i.e. do not include an analysis of documentation, would come down to an external inspection of an establishment, and as such would only be superficial. Therefore, on 9 February 2011 the Human Rights Defender decided to suspend preventive visits to nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals until the relevant statutory amendments are introduced. The Defender notified international institutions about serious problems in exercising the mandate of the Mechanism. Limited access to personal data, including sensitive ones, affected also the composition of visiting teams. For this reason, external experts were not included in visiting teams. Therefore, the visiting group was not interdisciplinary as is required. It consisted mainly of lawyers and political scientists specialising in social rehabilitation and criminology, as well as of rehabilitation educators. In view of the above, the need to amend the Act became a matter of urgency. On 18 November 2011, the Act of 18 August 2011 amending the Act on Human Rights Defender23 entered into force. Pursuant to the Act, the Defender may process all the information, including personal data, referred to in Article 27(1) of the Act of 29 August 1997 on personal data protection24, which is necessary to perform the Defender’s statutory tasks. The guarantee for appropriate protection of such data is also included in Article 21(2) of  Order No 5/2010 of the Human Rights Defender of 2 November 2010 on temporary limitation of the scope of tasks performed by the employees of the “National Preventive Mechanism” Team.  Dz. U. of 2011 No 222, item 1320. 24  Dz. U. of 2002 No 101, item 926, as amended. 22 23 23