V.  Where possible the courts postpone hearings and, in such cases, pre-sentence reports are not drafted and sent to the courts;  In urgent cases, when pre-sentence reports need to be prepared, the interviews with the accused person are carried out as much as possible by telephone or videoconferencing;  In some countries control visits of the supervision patrol are performed briefly in front of the home address of the offenders;  In some countries due to COVID-19, although staff do not usually work on weekends, they have been on call to deal with incidents of self-harm and domestic violence;  Electronic monitoring (EM) continues as usual, face-to-face meetings are replaced by phone calls or other online tools. In some countries in order to cope with early releases from prison, the maximum term for execution of sentence with EM has been increased from 4 to 6 months, in others EM is used as an aid to help prevent domestic violence;  Concern is expressed by many probation services that putting more people under probation may lead to probation overcrowding and pressure on the probation staff work and caseload. Therefore, it is recommended to use effectively meaningful community sanctions and measures and to avoid mass supervision. The PC-CP WG also wishes to draw the attention of all relevant national stakeholders to the fact that a number of countries have introduced emergency measures aimed at decreasing prison numbers and reducing prison overcrowding like: reducing as much as possible the number of accused or sentenced persons sent to detention centres and prisons; releasing certain categories of inmates (vulnerable inmates due to their age or health status), juveniles, pregnant women or women with infant children, inmates planned to be released in the near future anyway or low risk offenders. In relation to this the PC-CP WG wishes to remind that Council of Europe has persistently recommended to the national authorities of its member States2 (and in the first place Ministries of Justice, judges and prosecutors) to make more efficient and frequent use of community sanctions and measures, as measures of ‘first resort’ where possible, in order to effectively reduce crime by using interventions which are more likely to promote desistance, and do not break the social ties of offenders but rather build on and reinforce these ties in order to combat further offending. Such interventions can be coupled, where appropriate, with new surveillance technologies like electronic monitoring (EM), in full respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms and also based on the understanding that new technologies cannot and should not replace the meaningful human contact with offenders. Community sanctions and measures can be used in their own right, they can replace a prison sentence or accelerate release as an integral part of early release schemes of inmates and can thus effectively reduce the overuse of imprisonment as a sanction. 2 For more information regarding recommended measures to be taken for reducing the use of imprisonment (White Paper on Prison Overcrowding and High-Level Conference). 6