PRE-DEPORTATION DETENTION FACILITIES 4.5 – TOILETS A blanket and a pillow should be provided to those taken into police custody in Saarbrücken St. Johann Police Station. Particular attention should also be paid to ensuring the cleanliness of the sobering-up cell. Further recommendations concerned the staffing level at Dortmund Police Headquarters and the number of people being held in the multiple-occupancy cell, as well as the need to fit fire alarms in Erfurt North Police Station. In Frankfurt (Oder) Police Station officers are always present when detainees are examined by a doctor. This violates the person concerned’s rights of personality, and safety aspects do not generally necessitate this measure. Aside from justified exceptional cases, only medical staff should be present when a detainee is examined by a doctor. Further, the Joint Commission noted the strong smell of urine and faeces in the entire custody suite, a matter which urgently needs to be remedied. The police headquarters in Bonn, Dortmund and Cologne have custody rooms with an integrated toilet which are monitored by CCTV camera. Apart from in Dortmund Police Headquarters, the toilet is not pixelated on the CCTV monitoring screens. In these police headquarters, as well as in Erfurt North, Frankfurt (Oder) and Potsdam Police Stations, the toilets are fully visible through a peephole. The detainees’ privacy is insufficiently protected in all these cases. 4.6 – FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS To reduce the risk of injury and at the same time to ensure those taken into custody are able to sleep, the custody rooms in Neunkirchen (Saar), Saarbrücken St. Johann and Frankfurt (Oder) Police Station should be fitted with dimmable lighting. 5 – PRE-DEPORTATION DETENTION FACILITIES The Joint Commission visited Eisenhüttenstadt Pre-deportation Detention Facility for a follow-up visit. The facility can accommodate up to 108 people and is responsible for enforcing custody pending deportation in Brandenburg, as well as on behalf of Berlin, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Thuringia, Saxony, SaxonyAnhalt and Schleswig-Holstein. It is also responsible for enforcing custody pending deportation as ordered by the Federal Police. The facility only had a few detainees awaiting deportation at the time of the visit. The Joint Commission had already recommended during its original visit that visibility of the toilet in the specially secured room should be restricted on the CCTV monitoring screen. The facility immediately implemented this recommendation by affixing stickers to the monitoring screen. Strip-searches upon admission, which is standard practice in the facility, represents a serious invasion of the person concerned’s privacy. Strip-searches may be justified in order to ensure security in the facility and to prevent disorder or crime, but they must be carried out circumspectly and neither routinely nor independently of case-specific suspicions. 25 Detainees awaiting deportation are not offenders, nor are they being kept in prison on suspicion of a crime. That is why the need for a strip-search must be subject to a rigorous examination over and above the requirements set by the Federal Constitutional Court in regard to pre-trial detention.26 The Joint Commission gained a positive general impression of the staff’s treatment of the detainees awaiting deportation and in regard to implementation of the recommendations it had made in 2013.27 25 See III.4.2 above See Federal Constitutional Court, order of 4 Feb. 2009, file no. 2 BvR 455/08, margin no. 35 – juris 27 National Agency, Annual Report 2013, p. 49 et seqq. 26 33