A/HRC/31/57/Add.4 80. It is of crucial importance to strengthen the country’s capacity to produce and publicize clear and relevant data, including the incidence of torture, ill-treatment and death in custody among various vulnerable groups, including racial, sexual, gender and other minority groups. C. Safeguards and prevention 81. Under constitutional, substantive and procedural law, Brazilian legislation, on paper, offers adequate safeguards against the ill-treatment of its citizens. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the policies and measures adopted, or envisioned, at various levels of government to fight torture and ill-treatment. 82. Yet, he observed during his visit how the sudden increase in arrests and incarceration had contributed to straining physical infrastructure and human resources, at the expense of the observance of these safeguards. 83. He learned that the national Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office has a hotline service that receives complaints of torture and ill-treatment. Between January 2012 and June 2014, it received 5,431 such complaints (about 181 per month), of which 84 per cent referred to incidents at police stations and detention facilities. However, as suggested above, the vast majority of acts of torture, ill-treatment and killings were never reported. 84. Law No. 12.847 of 2 August 2013 establishes a national system for preventing and combating torture, which includes a national committee for preventing and combating torture and a national mechanism to prevent and combat torture, as required by the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which has appointed all its members and has recently begun monitoring and policy formulation activities. 85. Currently, only six states have laws establishing a torture prevention mechanism, and only two of these have effectively implemented a statewide preventive mechanism, modelled after requirements of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. The Special Rapporteur expresses his concern at the reported lack of funding for those mechanisms. 86. The national mechanism to prevent and combat torture is physically placed at, and financially dependent on, the Human Rights Secretariat, with its resources deriving from the general budget of the latter. 87. The Special Rapporteur strongly encourages the Government to ensure that key information is made available and easily accessible to the public. Fair representation of NGOs in various councils is contemplated in Law No. 12.847/2013. It would be important to make public the criteria applied in appointing the 12 NGO members of the national mechanism to prevent and combat torture. 88. The national mechanism undertook its first visits in June 2015 and has published its first report, highlighting a lack of compliance with international standards and offering recommendations to various Government institutions. The Special Rapporteur encourages the Government to ensure that these recommendations receive the appropriate follow-up. 89. Parallel to the monitoring activities of the national mechanism, as well as statewide preventive mechanisms, prisons in Brazil are regularly visited by monitoring institutions, such as public defender’s offices, prosecutors and a number of civil society organizations. With some exceptions, all are granted access to detention centres. 90. In addition, the Special Rapporteur received concerning reports of a recent incident, on 17 August 2015, when a team from the statewide preventive mechanism of Pernambuco, during a detention visit, was subjected to racist and transphobic insults and death threats by 14