High-level talks with national authorities 17. It is standard practice for CPT visiting delegations to hold talks with the national authorities, at both the outset and the end of the visit. The end-of-visit talks usually involve the participation of Ministers and are the occasion for the delegation to present its preliminary observations. The CPT has also continued to seek to intensify its ongoing dialogue with certain states by means of high-level talks outside the framework of a given visit. 18. Such talks were held in Azerbaijan on 31 May and 1 June 2018 to discuss the state of co-operation between the CPT and the Azerbaijani authorities and, in particular, the implementation of the CPT’s long-standing recommendations concerning law enforcement agencies and prisons, including those made in the report on the CPT’s October 2017 ad hoc visit. Investigations into several complaints of torture and other forms of ill-treatment by law enforcement officials, of which the CPT had become aware in the period between its 2015 and 2017 ad hoc visits, were also discussed in depth. In the margins of a Committee of Ministers’ meeting in Strasbourg on 13 March, the President of the CPT also had a bilateral meeting with the Belgium’s Minister of Justice. They discussed action taken by the Belgian authorities in the light of the CPT’s 2017 public statement on Belgium and other matters arising from the report on the 2017 periodic visit to the country. 19. Further, general ongoing matters were discussed at senior level with the authorities during visits to Hungary, the Russian Federation and Turkey. At the end of the periodic visit to Hungary, the steps taken by the Hungarian authorities to implement certain recommendations regarding Csongrád County Border Police Division set out in the report on the CPT’s 2017 visit to Hungary were discussed. In the course of the visit to the Russian Federation, a meeting was held with senior officials from the Ministry of Justice and Federal Penitentiary Service to explore the action taken by the Russian authorities following reports on ill-treatment of prisoners by staff at Yaroslavl Colony No. 1. Action taken by the Investigative Committee’s Main Investigative Department in the North Caucasian Federal District and Investigative Department in the Chechen Republic in the period since the CPT’s visit to the Chechen Republic in December 2017 was also discussed with senior representatives of those authorities. The talks in Turkey related to the current situation of Abdullah Öcalan and the other prisoners being held at Imralı F-type High-Security Prison, in particular as regards the prisoners’ contact with the outside world. Plenary meetings and activities of subgroups 20. The CPT held three one-week plenary meetings (in March, July and November), in the course of which a total of 17 visit reports were adopted. Page 12 ►General Report of the CPT, 2018