record-keeping by the units responsible for the round. The system is not always satisfactory as a result. And yet, some units, those where the cells cannot be used or in the Paris inner suburbs, have, much like the customs departments, adopted a practice more in line with the obligation to protect people deprived of their liberty, which the gendarmes follow in light of their code of ethics: placement in a neighbouring police or gendarmerie unit where round-the-clock presence is ensured. It may, at times justifiably, be argued that this implies travel that is not always easy to accomplish. But such an argument should not prevail, for the gendarmerie units the furthest away from the main town in a département or district are also those that practise the lowest number of custody measures and which, moreover, typically take short-term measures which do not require a person to stay in a cell overnight. As complicated as such journeys are, they would certainly be rare, and less taxing than night-time inspections, waking people in custody up in the middle of the night and acceptance of a risk bearing on gendarmes' personal accountability. It therefore strikes as necessary that the gendarmerie stop detaining people overnight without direct surveillance in each of its units and identify which units would be able to assume this responsibility or, failing that, rely on the national police in this regard. 5.2 Custody procedures in the départements in the Paris inner suburbs In 2017 the CGLPL had the opportunity to carry out more inspections than in previous years in the three départements making up the Paris inner suburbs. These visits revealed that the way the law enforcement service is organised leads to serious infringements on freedom. The people arrested in these départements once the law enforcement services of the police stations have closed can end up spending a whole night in custody without any investigative measure being undertaken, on such lame pretexts that they are usually released the following morning after a simple hearing. In practice, what this means is that, after 7pm, so for people arrested after about 6pm, cases are handled by one on-duty law enforcement officer per district, so covering four or five police stations, tasked with the initial investigations for the 95% that "minor cases" make up. The officer's role cannot, therefore, extend further than placing the people arrested in custody, for s/he is not authorised to carry out any other procedural formality. The police stations' law enforcement officers coming on-duty around 9 o'clock the next morning therefore take over at this point, and hold hearings during the morning. In many cases, the people brought in for questioning are then released after a single hearing on the instruction of the prosecutor's office. Accordingly, a significant number of people are detained, often for fifteen hours at a time, even for the most minor offences, solely because of the services' inadequate organisation. As puzzling as that may seem, neither lawyers nor the prosecutor's office seem to find fault with this situation, which appears to be dismissed as inevitable. The CGLPL therefore invites the Ministers of the Interior and Justice to reconsider the way the law enforcement services are organised in the départements of the Paris inner suburbs, so that people are not deprived of their liberty for several hours in minor cases, without any investigative formalities being initiated. 33