allotted time. This is all the more surprising since this Ministry has responded on behalf of independent public institutions over which, by definition, it does not exercise any supervisory power whereas the Ministries of the Interior and Justice have only to respond as regards their own departments. The CGLPL nevertheless received all of the information it had requested after the deadline given for submissions, with the exception of the information bearing on the specific recommendations concerning penal institutions. This shortcoming is regrettably the sign of a deeper failing. For there was a fairly broad consensus that the answers requested required "an enormous amount of work" when, if the central administrations had assumed their responsibility regarding the implementation of the CGLPL's recommendations, such responses should have amounted simply to extracting datasets from their dashboard. The first thing that this initial monitoring exercise has thus laid bare is the rhetorical nature of the answers supplied by the ministers to the CGLPL's reports, since these answers do not give rise for their part to monitoring which would certainly exist if the CGLPL's recommendations had genuinely led to action plans. The CGLPL can only urge the ministers to set up sustainable monitoring of its recommendations. Of course, the ministers' discretion must not be overlooked: each minister is entitled to consider that a CGLPL recommendation - with the exception of those bearing on compliance with applicable law - is not relevant. In this respect, s/he may therefore state his/her disagreement and choose not to put it into practice. This is why, since September 2017, the ministers have been expressly asked to indicate the action they intend to take regarding each of the recommendations they receive. If the minister agrees with the recommendations, s/he shall put them into practice - which, logically, means that s/he shall unlock the necessary means to that end and that the CGLPL can refer to this agreement in all similar situations. If the minister does not agree, the CGLPL would appreciate it if s/he could explain his/her reasons. In this case, the CGLPL might come round to the minister's opinion or, where it considers it necessary, leverage, in complete independence, other means of influence, such as by calling on its international contacts, Parliament, civil society or through direct communication. The difficulty the Ministries had in responding to the CGLPL within the threemonth time-limit is nevertheless a sign of a genuine problem adopting the recommendations. This is why a technical meeting will be organised in the first quarter of 2018 to learn and move on from this first exercise. Finally, the comment was made in several instances that the recommendation made did not come under the minister being questioned, but another member of the Government; one minister (a ministre d'État) even left one question blank, on the grounds that this apparently did not come under the directorate of his/her ministry, whom s/he had tasked with responding to the question, but another department, also placed under his/her authority. It is important to make it clear here, then, that the CGLPL only reaches out to ministers with authority over the institutions inspected, who must carry out the necessary coordination work with the other ministerial departments 24. Here again, the response given, reflecting a certain administrative naivety, must be seen as the sign that nothing was done to act upon the CGLPL's recommendation - which is not contested, it should be pointed out. 24 The fact that the reports on penal institutions lead to a submission to the Minister of Justice and Minister of Health should not be construed as the consequence of the direct supervision of the latter over the health units in detention which, let us remember, do not come under the penal system, but the hospital system. 43