• Limited space hinders the performance of therapeutic activities and may strengthen or deepen non-psychiatric mental disorders or mental retardation that some prisoners may suffer from. • Small living space also involves a higher risk of infectious diseases (e.g. viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, scabies). • Moreover, placing individuals in such constrained spaces entails a risk of inhuman and degrading treatment, which collides with the international obligations of Poland. • Such treatment of prisoners is an affront to a modern European country and significantly deviates from international standards. • Both CPT as well as CAT have been calling on Polish authorities to introduce changes in that regard. • Failure to introduce them entails the risk of passing unfavourable rulings against Poland by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. • In such a situation, also the risk of paying compensation adjudicated to prisoners by Polish courts is on the rise. • European courts examining the request of a Polish court to apply the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) will be able to postpone the execution of the warrant, if they assume that there is a risk of degrading treatment of a prisoner in Poland due to insufficient living space in a cell. Prisoners’ body searches should be subject to court’s assessment Request that was submitted in 2016 by the Commissioner for Human Rights to the Constitutional Tribunal to ascertain the non-compliance of Article 116 (6) of the Executive Penal Code in conjunction with Article 7 (1) of the Executive Penal Code with the Constitution in the scope, in which it does not provide for the issuance of a decision concerning a body search performed on a prisoner, is still awaiting consideration (court’s file no. K 5/16) Despite NMPT’s appeals, the legislator did not decide to amend provisions in that scope. The Minister of Justice informed the Commissioner that work is in progress in the National Headquarters of the Prison Service with respect to the development of comprehensive procedures aimed at specifying in which Report of the Commissioner for Human Rights on the activities of the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture in Poland in 2018 61