E/CN.4/2003/8/Add.3 page 3 had been arbitrarily detained in previous years, and even some who had been convicted recently, had been given no opportunity to remedy their situation through ordinary judicial procedures. This led President Fox to set up the Commission on Release from Prison. Although the authorities were found to be open and willing to improve the monitoring of detention (a point which the Working Group would like to emphasize), it is still difficult to give effect to measures to prevent arbitrariness. Two examples can be given: the presumption of innocence, which is not expressly mentioned in any legislation, and the concept of “equipollent flagrancy”, which amounts to a sort of blank cheque for detaining people. Abuses that took place mostly in the past but that still take place today as a result of both corruption and a lack of human rights training have helped to create a situation in which many people are extremely vulnerable in the presence of public officials. The problem of the impunity of many officials in connection with arbitrary detention has not yet been overcome. The system often lends itself to this scenario. Moreover, in some parts of the country, particularly in the countryside, there are a number of powerful individuals who, in association with certain local authorities, are able to operate outside the law, sowing fear among local, sometimes indigenous, communities. Despite the efforts of the Guerrero Human Rights Commission, the majority of complaints of arbitrary detention received by the Working Group in this State concern situations of this kind. In addition, although the Working Group’s mandate does not cover detention conditions, its visits to a large number of detention centres revealed several situations that it is bound to mention for humanitarian reasons, so that the State can do something to resolve them. Prison conditions need to be improved, particularly in certain parts of the countryside, given the present overcrowding (Oaxaca, Tlaxiaco, Iguala and Acapulco) and the unlikelihood of any reduction in the number of inmates under the current penal system and system of criminal procedure. In the high-security prisons (“federal centres for social rehabilitation”, known by the abbreviation “Ceferesos”), where security is so tight that not only the members of the Working Group, but also the prison governor himself, had to go through numerous security checks, inmates have no privacy when they talk to their lawyers (their papers are often photocopied). Contacts between inmates and their relatives are even more restricted. Fernando Gatica Chino and his wife Felicitas Padilla Navas, who are held in separate detention centres and whose detention was declared arbitrary (under category III) by the Working Group in its opinion No. 37 (2000) are allowed only one eight-minute telephone call a month.