Members of the Team who in 2011 visited the establishments in the capacity of... National Preventive Mechanism is entitled to submit proposals and observations concerning existing or draft legislation which concerns persons deprived of their liberty. In 2011, the NPM put forward an opinion about the draft Ordinance of the Minister of Justice on the conditions and the method for carrying out tests to determine the concentration of alcohol or some other intoxicating substance in the organism of a juvenile, and on the procedures for recording such tests and for verifying its results. The Mechanism’s doubts were raised by the fact that the draft did not determine the authority which would be competent to instruct juveniles, their parents or legal guardians about their right to a blood test in order to verify the breathalyzer test results and saliva testing. In the opinion of the Mechanism, it would be also recommendable to include in the testing protocol a statement (signed by a juvenile, a parent or a guardian) in which a signee declares that he/ she acquainted himself/herself with the test results and that he/she was instructed by the guardian about the right to demand verification of the conducted tests. The National Preventive Mechanism expressed its opinion about the draft Act on amending the Act on juvenile delinquency proceedings and the Law on the Organisation of Common Courts. The NPM’s doubts were raised by the fact that the age limit for being legally recognized as a juvenile has been lowered (to 10 years old), which will allow to detain in care and educational establishments children aged 10. According to the NPM, this raises some serious doubts in the context of resocialisation and therapeutic guidelines set out by modern science. In the opinion of the NPM, the decision to delete the provision which allows to apply a conditional suspension of a juvenile’s detention in a facility was not justified. Moreover, the Mechanism submitted no remarks or proposals regarding the draft Ordinance of the Minister of National Education on the detailed rules for referring, admitting, transferring, releasing and holding juveniles in a youth care centre, nor any remarks on the draft Ordinance of the Minister of Justice on the detailed specification of the amount of a scholarship for juveniles participating in vocational training in the form of vocational internship at school workshops run by a school or a complex of schools within a juvenile detention centre or a juvenile shelter. 6. Members of the Team who in 2011 visited the establishments in the capacity of the National Preventive Mechanism (in alphabetical order) Ewelina Brzostymowska – a lawyer, graduate of the Lazarski University’s Faculty of Law in Warsaw, currently a doctoral student at the Institute of Legal Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 2009, she has been dealing with the issues of executive criminal law in the Human Rights Defender’s Office. 143

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