held publically accountable for the situation in its detention centres. Therefore, it is important that NGOs in collaboration with other interested stakeholders make their best efforts to promote the publication of the report. There are no fixed methods for doing this since the methodology for influencing such government decisions depends on the specific context and regulation in the country concerned. However, it is worth highlighting a very positive experience from Mexico, where NGOs managed to get the report published through lawsuits based on domestic access to information laws. Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review.7 These international mechanisms can support and contribute to existing domestic advocacy efforts but should not be relied on alone. One of the main concerns of UN human rights monitoring mechanisms, such as the SPT, is the risk of reprisals against persons who collaborate with them or provide them information. This risk can be very high for persons who provide testimony to the SPT since they have very limited possibilities of protecting themselves against detention personnel and other would-be When the Mexican government received the SPT report, it decided not to make it public. A group of NGOs then decided to make a request based on IFAI (Federal Institute for Access to Information). First, the request was rejected and the government argued that the publication of the report would pose a risk to national security. After another legal argument, IFAI decided to oblige the government to make the report public. That same day the report was published in the webpage of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, together with a plan of action regarding the implementation of the recommendations. The request to make the report public was done by the NGOs because they knew that it would give them the opportunity to press for the implementation of the recommendations and also point out that the state again received many recommendations. Another way of promoting publication is by ensuring that other international or regional human rights mechanisms bring up the issue of publication when they conduct their country reviews. This could, for instance, be when your country is reviewed by UN treaty bodies such as the Committee Against Torture or the Human Rights Committee or during the examination in the UN perpetrators. The periods immediately after the visit and again after the publication of the visit report can be particularly high-risk periods, since these events might expose misconduct by detention personnel and prompt criminal or administrative sanctions against them. NGOs that have access to places of detention and the NPM can seek to increase the protection against 7. For more information on these bodies see http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/Pages/HumanRightsBodies.aspx; for a guide on how to influence the Universal Periodic Review see http://www.irct.org/Files/Filer/publications/UPR-Guide.pdf 14 Working with the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture: A practical guide for NGOs engaging with SPT country visits