A/68/295 guarantees of humane treatment for persons in custodial care, including securing a prompt and effective judicial control of detention; providing adequate, accessible and appropriate health care; ensuring the availability of appropriate judicial resources and effective complaint systems; and allowing contact with the outside world and access to other activities, including for those awaiting trial. 37. As a rule of general application, the Rules should refrain from transferring inmates to a distant facility (see the Body of Principles, principle 20) or to a facility with much worse conditions as a form of punishment and from placing heavy restrictions on inmates’ contact with the outside world, except as incidental to justifiable segregation or the maintenance of discipline (see Rules 57 and 60). Although the Rules highlight the importance for prisoners under sentence of maintaining contact with the outside world (see part II, sect. A), this principle should be of general application for all persons deprived of liberty, including death row inmates, to mitigate the level of suffering that is inherent to the condition of persons sentenced to death 3 and to ensure that the penitentiary system comprises treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, art. 10 (3)). Furthermore, the Rules should guarantee that segregation and isolation are not used as a subtle form of punishment and that persons who are segregated or isolated are held in conditions applicable to the rest of the prison or penitentiary population and are subject to the full range of protections. The rationale behind this is that in some countries different forms of prison regimes and forms of segregation are used as additional measures of punishment, for example by excluding those imprisoned for life from work, educational or other activities. In some countries, prisoners serving a life sentence are confined, in virtual isolation, for up to 22 hours a day in small, cramped, unventilated cells, often in extreme temperatures, without any type of prison activities. 38. Given the excessive use of pretrial detention for long periods of time, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that all persons deprived of liberty have access to activities and can benefit from other privileges to which the general prison population is entitled. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges that it may be difficult to implement this principle, given the fairly rapid turnover of persons awaiting trial and the fact that police stations and other detention facilities may not be adapted for this purpose. As the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment has noted, however, prisoners cannot simply be left to languish for weeks, possibly months, locked up in their cells (see CPT/Inf (92) 3, para. 47). 39. It is important to consider that the deprivation of the right to individual selfdetermination is not incidental to criminal punishment or any other form of custodial care. The current phrasing of Rule 57 can be misunderstood as meaning that deprivation of liberty results in the withdrawal of individual self-determination. It may be pertinent to redraft Rule 58 in order to clarify that only reasonable boundaries inherent to the regime in the places of detention apply. Likewise, Rule 69 could be amended to omit the reference to the conduct of a study of the __________________ 3 13-42285 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Handbook on Prisoners with Special Needs (Vienna, 2009), pp. 159-164. Available from www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/ Prisoners-with-special-needs.pdf. 9/23