Section one Introduction Context To do a better job next year we need to strengthen both the NPM and its members. A key challenge for us remains our informal status, lack of legislation and guarantees of independence and, finally, the inadequate nature of the resources available centrally. I have raised these issues with the government and it was particularly disappointing for me and for Peter Clarke (Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales) that the provisions on prisons in the Prisons and Courts Bill that was before the last parliament have not been reintroduced. This would have been an opportunity for the government to formalise the essential link between HMI Prisons and OPCAT and to set out the NPM’s essential status in legislation. Sadly, we are one of very few NPMs anywhere in the world operating without legislation providing a secure basis for our work. On the more positive side, we were very pleased to host the Chairperson of the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (SPT), Sir Malcolm Evans, at our March 2017 business meeting. He reminded us that the way in which OPCAT works in the UK has relevance well beyond the UK, and that the SPT considers it essential that any NPM has a clear, separate legal basis: de facto autonomy is not necessarily enough. I was also pleased to attend the panel organised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) on the 10th anniversary of the entry into force of OPCAT, at which Baroness Anelay (then Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) expressed the FCO’s continuing commitment to torture prevention.1 We hope that this, and the government’s enthusiasm for promoting the UK NPM internationally, will be reflected in concrete progress at home in addressing the weaknesses in our structure. It has been a busy year. We published our isolation guidance, which is already being used by UK NPM members and NPMs internationally to strengthen their practice and make recommendations to detaining authorities for improving practice. We also began work on examining ‘transitions and pathways’ between places of detention, the details of which are set out later in this report. We continue to engage widely with international and regional human rights bodies (the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) and the SPT) and other inter-governmental bodies. More recently we joined with other NPMs in proposing to the Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and EU that they support NPMs in establishing an NPM-led network, reflecting the fact that across the region NPMs have grown in confidence and standing and are ready to see a shift in approach to them from inter-governmental bodies. 1. The Rt Hon Baroness Anelay of St Johns DBE, ‘Speech to mark the 10th Anniversary of OPCAT’, 29 June 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-to-mark-the-10th-anniversary-of-opcat [accessed 09/11/17]. 5