a result, prisoners, who do not speak Georgian or Russian, are in a vacuum of information. The language barrier, in turn, creates barriers in terms of accessing quality medical, legal or other services. The Special Preventive Group believes that a long-term solution to the problem would be to offer regular language courses to prisoners, while the short-term solution would be to provide an interpreter’s service, translate necessary documents, fill the library with foreign language literature and add some foreign TV channels. It is to be welcomed that the Special Penitentiary Service plans to publish some of the most demanded legal acts in Russian and English languages in order to provide legal assistance to prisoners. Contact with family members: Telephone communication is the main opportunity for foreign prisoners to communicate with the outside world. An obstacle in Establishment No. 8 is the fact that prisoners are given the opportunity to make a call once every 10 days, in accordance with the queue of the cells. International calls can be made only on two fixed days a week. Consequently, if the day intended for international calls does not coincide with the day when a particular cell can make a call, the foreign prisoner is not be able to exercise this right.143 Georgian convicts allow foreign prisoners to use only 1 out of 60 telephones available in Establishment No. 15. Family members of foreign prisoners, in most cases, live abroad, which is why prisoners cannot exercise their right to long and short visits. As video calls with convicts is organized outside the penitentiary facility by the National Probation Agency, foreign convicts are unable to be compensated for the abovementioned shortage by video calls either.144 International practice shows that one of the main ideas145 of video calls is to facilitate communication between the convict and his relatives without movement.146 143 For example, if a foreign prisoner is allowed to make a call on the 1st day of each month according to the queue (and if Mondays and Thursdays are designated for international calls) and if the 1st day of the month coincides with Tuesday, the foreign prisoner will only be able to call within Georgia. 144 Imprisonment Code, Article 171, part 3. 145 In some European countries (for example, the Netherlands, Switzerland), the mechanism of video calls has been adapted to the very foreign convicts. In Britain and France, the video call system is being implemented only in some of the penitentiary facilities in a pilot mode, but the above has been actively considered in the context of foreign prisoners. Accordingly, this mechanism will become useless if prisoners’ relatives have to arrive at certain institutions for making video calls. 146 Italy, where the mechanism of video calls was introduced in January 2019, has an interesting practice. The procedure is as follows: The prisoner provides his/her family member's e-mail address, who is then contacted and requested by the penitentiary service to present a document certifying his/her kinship with the prisoner, as well as to sign a document confirming that only he/she will take part in the call. During a Skype call, the screen and the prisoner are visually monitored. The text is available in Italian at: <https://tinyurl.com/y5xma24q> [last accessed: 19.02.2020]. 57