CAT/C/MDV/CO/1 (d) Hire additional duly trained prison staff, including medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses, ensure prompt referrals for specialist health care outside detention facilities and disclose documents regarding the medical wellbeing of persons deprived of their liberty to both them and their families; (e) Prevent prisoners from contracting infectious diseases during their imprisonment by introducing health screening of inmates upon admission to places of detention, separating healthy prisoners from those suffering from contagious diseases and providing adequate treatment to infected persons and to persons with psychosocial disabilities, including an individual mental health regime. Monitoring places of deprivation of liberty 37. While noting that members of parliamentary committees and the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives, acting as the national preventive mechanism, have the right to visit places of detention, the Committee is concerned that the State party has not established a national system to independently monitor and inspect all places where persons are deprived of their liberty and are detained for interrogation or pretrial detention, places of detention during the trial and places for the implementation of sentences, such as police stations and custodial facilities, remand detention centres, prisons and juvenile detention and psychiatric facilities, and receive complaints confidentially. Furthermore, the Committee is concerned at the absence of visits by national and international civil society organizations (arts. 2, 11, 12, 13 and 16). 38. The State party should: (a) Provide additional financial resources to the National Human Rights Commission of the Maldives in order to enable it to carry out more visits and better fulfil its functions as the national preventive mechanism, including the function of conducting unannounced visits to all places of deprivation of liberty and meeting in private with persons confined there, and make public the reports of the Commission to the authorities; (b) Ensure that all persons, including those in detention, have access to a complaints mechanism through which they can transmit confidential allegations of torture or ill-treatment that cannot be accessed by administrators of the place of deprivation of liberty in which they are held; (c) Grant access for independent organizations, including national and international civil society organizations, to all facilities where persons are deprived of their liberty. Inadmissibility of statements made as a result of torture 39. The Committee is concerned at reports of widespread practice of torture and illtreatment of persons deprived of their liberty with a view to extracting confessions. The Committee is also concerned that confessions allegedly resulting from the torture of suspects have been accepted as evidence in judicial proceedings (arts. 2, 15 and 16). 40. The State party should: (a) Ensure, in law and in practice, that any statement resulting from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is not invoked as evidence in court, except against the persons who carried out those acts; (b) Ensure that courts dismiss in practice all cases in which evidence has been obtained as a result of coerced confessions, investigate and prosecute all such allegations of torture and ill-treatment, and provide redress to victims; (c) Inform the Committee in its next report about all cases that were dismissed in court because evidence was obtained as a result of coerced confessions. 9