MONITORING ACTIVITIES 65 Morten Engberg Senior Head of Department, Monitoring Department The Ombudsman carries out regular monitoring visits to institutions for detainees in order to ensure that they live under humane and dignified conditions. The target group includes, among others, prison inmates, patients at secure psychiatric wards and children placed in care. Many monitoring visits are not carried out solely by the Ombudsman and his staff. The Ombudsman has a close cooperation with DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture and the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Consequently, the two organisations often participate in monitoring visits. Therefore, there was nothing unusual about the Ombudsman and representatives from the two organisations visiting the asylum centre ‘Center Sandholm’ in 2014 in order to look into conditions for persons under tolerated residence status. But the case touched on very sensitive and much discussed questions which would influence the Ombudsman’s report. Persons under tolerated residence status at ‘Center Sandholm’ are subject to a number of special restrictions. They are obligated to live at the centre (some of them in rooms together with one or two other people), they have a duty to report to the police (typically every day), they are not allowed to take on paid work, they receive a limited cash allowance (a maximum of DKK 31 a day), and in reality it is not possible for them to cook their own food; instead they get meal coupons for the centre’s cafeteria. There is no limitation to the duration of tolerated residence, and basically the tolerated residence may last indefinitely. Contrary to, for instance, the majority of prison inmates, it is thus not possible for persons under tolerated residence status to adjust to a situation which they know will last for a fixed period of time, and therefore they cannot look forward to a normalisation of their lives.