SUMMARY BY THE PUBLIC DEFENDER OF RIGHTS The Defender has been active as the national preventive mechanism for fourteen years now. In 2019, we continued conducting systematic visits and implementing long-term recommendations in the area of prevention of ill-treatment. I provide a brief summary of the most important achievements: We visited a total of 25 facilities. Some of the visits focused on specific topics: we completed a series of visits to homes for people with disabilities, continued in remand prisons and institutional care facilities for children, and started visiting special regime homes. The findings from these visits are always a basis for comprehensive summary reports, which were numerous this time: In 2019, reports were drawn up on secure preventive detention, facilities for children requiring immediate assistance, forensic treatment and homes for people with disabilities. We continued monitoring police cells, facilities for detention of foreigners, as well as general and children’s psychiatric facilities. In Chapters 1 to 5, we summarise our activities in 2019 according to the individual areas of detention. I consider the assessment of conditions of institutional forensic treatment and its systemic framework to be the most important topic of our current activities. The series of visits showed dangerous gaps in the legislation and its practical implementation. The State does not specify the capacity of facilities where treatment is to take place and many hospitals are currently overloaded, lack sufficient staff and improvise in ensuring safety and guarding of the relevant departments. We also found that patients remained in detention regime for longer than necessary and appropriate. Therefore, we address a number of recommendations to the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice. In Chapter 3, we outline only the essential findings and I invite anyone interested to study the whole published report. The visits yielded only a few unambiguous findings on ill-treatment; however, certain risky practices are basically used everywhere to some extent, and the safeguards are insufficient. As in last year’s report, I address this separately in Chapter 6. I briefly describe the deficiencies related to effective prevention of ill-treatment in the Czech Republic, most often in the area of the statutory framework. Unfortunately, these are long-term problems. Foreigner detention facilities and forensic treatment institutions lack independent supervision and protection against potential interference with the inmates’ rights. Social services lack an independent complaints mechanism, the State’s inspectors cannot access parts of the documentation kept by service providers and there is no legal basis for punishing infractions. I have found similar problems plaguing psychiatric care. Nevertheless, although a number of measures have been merely copy-pasted from previous years, we have conducted some positive negotiations, e.g. in terms of recording and reporting medical findings on ill-treatment and ensuring privacy during medical examinations. I believe that if CPT’s recommendations begin to be implemented responsibly, we will be able to see a shift in this area in 2020. I sincerely hope this text will prove to be an inspiration to your work.  Anna Šabatová