A/HRC/34/54/Add.1 forced to drink salty water, had no access to sunlight (except for a few days before the Special Rapporteur’s visit) and could not be visited by their families. Their individual cells, which were small and completely dark, were however opened during the day, allowing inmates to communicate,11 and mattresses and blankets, as well as limited medical care, had been provided. 2. Lack of adequate infrastructure and trained personnel 54. Another serious concern is the lack of trained prison personnel and appropriate infrastructure for detention. The State does not have experience or training in the management of penitentiaries or in ensuring safe conditions of detention for prisoners. While the overall responsibility for all detention facilities in Mauritania lies with the Ministry of Justice, with the Directorate for the Administration of Penitentiaries and Penal Affairs responsible for convicted prisoners and the public prosecutor responsible for pretrial detainees, external and internal security in all detention locations is handled by the national guard. The national guard is a paramilitary corps subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior and Decentralization with no specific training in penitentiary security and administration. A notable exception to the above is the Salahdine detention facility, where the gendarmerie, subordinate to the Ministry of National Defence, is responsible for security. Like the national guard, however, the gendarmerie does not possess any specific training for these kinds of duties. 55. Each detention facility is in principle run by a director who represents the Ministry of Justice inside the prison. Discipline is the responsibility of the public prosecutor in each region, with the exception of Nouakchott, where it is directly under the Directorate for the Administration of Penitentiaries and Penal Affairs. In practice, however, the national guard runs the facilities and approaches them strictly from a security dimension (internal and external) with little concern for the well-being or rehabilitation of inmates. This translates into detention centres that simply keep inmates from escaping, without offering anything else. 56. Of particular concern is the fact that male members of the national guard are also responsible for the external and internal security of the women’s prison, and even have unconstrained access to cells. 57. Disciplinary measures are in principle administered by the prison director and usually consist of a loss of privileges for inmates. However, the power structures described above give national guard elements inappropriate leverage over detainees and the possibility to administer disciplinary measures at their own discretion, without supervision by the director or, ultimately, the prosecutor. Solitary confinement exists as a disciplinary measure of last resort and in certain penitentiaries can last more than 15 days – the limit set by international law beyond which it is considered to constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or even torture. 58. Despite the obligation to register all detainees, logbooks in law enforcement lockups and detention centres are often poorly kept, lack important information such as the release date of inmates or the authority that authorized their detention and sometimes seem to have been filled in retroactively. This puts detainees at risk of getting lost in the system, being ill-treated or not released on time. In that respect, the Special Rapporteur welcomes article 4 of the new anti-torture law, which explicitly sets out the minimum information required in all logbooks and recommends the revision and updating of existing logbooks to reflect the new obligations. 11 That said, inmates can only communicate with one other person, as the four individuals currently detained are kept in two separate rows of cells. 11