National Preventive Mechanism 3.2.6 Report of the commissions Last year a reference was made at this juncture to the positive preventive effects of the involvement of commission members in working groups (e.g. in the Federal Ministry of the Interior). This optimistic assessment can only be maintained in part. As a positive aspect it must be stressed that, within a working group from the Federal Ministry of Health and Women’s Affairs, which included commission members (Commission 3), the results relating to sexual assaults of particular occupational groups in hospitals were successfully implemented. In other areas it was necessary to relativise assessments significantly during the year under review. For instance, commission visits (Commission 4) showed that planning, e.g. as agreed on a consensual basis within the “Detention Working Group” in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, had still not been carried out after more than one year. Other changes which had already been adopted have even been suspended after some time. In particular, this concerns the regulation that – aside from specifically defined exceptions – detention pending forced return should be practised in the form of open detention, and also that care for individuals on hunger strike should be intensified. Failure to comply with notification duties A further point of criticism related to the duty to notify sensitive operations during which acts of direct administrative power and coercive measures may be expected, such as raids, demonstrations, football games or so-called problematic forced returns. On the one hand, these notification duties were not always complied with, in spite of the obligation stipulated in the directive, which resulted in the fact that the competent commissions only learned about critical operations retrospectively from media reports or internal monitoring reports of the authorities. On the other hand, there were irregularities in the notification intervals provided by the police for major operations. As early as 2015 an NPM recommendation was published that referred to this issue: “Only timely notification of the NPM regarding upcoming operations enables observation by the commissions and compliance with the NPM’s mandate”. The commissions acknowledge that such operations may have planning processes that do not always allow for early notification. Others, however, were planned long in advance and the NPM still was not notified in good time. A concrete example is the large-scale concerted action in the area of Islamic extremism carried out in Vienna and Graz on 26 January 2017 (150 officers were deployed in Vienna), for which only very short advance notice of 19 hours was given. Such a short-time scale can in some cases complicate and even prevent observation by the NPM. Critical detention in specially secured cells Visits to police detention centres have repeatedly shown inadequate sensitivity towards detention in specially secured cells. Commission 4 found that in some cases the duration of detention in these cells had been disproportionately long. In one case it had also been associated with restraints of mobility (chains), which raises concerns regarding the upholding of human rights. In this regard 90