2.3.5.  PRISONER ALLOCATION According to the European Prison Rules, prisoners shall be allocated, as far as possible, to prisons close to their homes or places of social rehabilitation.56 Prisoners should be consulted when moving them from one institution to another. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has recommended that prisoners should be able to maintain good contact with the outside world and any limitation thereof should be based only on substantial and manifest security risks.57 According to the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, although the European Convention does not grant prisoners the right to choose their place of detention, detaining an individual in a prison which is so far away from his/her family that visits are made very difficult or impossible may in some circumstances amount to interference with family life.58 This covers situations where remoteness is coupled with badly functioning transportation system, health status of family members and exhausting travel for children. For these reasons, prisoners should be consulted with before they are moved to another institution. Our monitoring showed that moving prisoners between institutions was quite a frequent practice during the reporting period. Often times prisoners are moved from the institutions located in the eastern Georgia to those located in the western Georgia or vice versa. As a result, the prisoners experience difficulties in maintaining contact with their families and lawyers and are suffering from the stress related to changed environment. For example, remand prisoners brought from the eastern Georgia to the penitentiary institution no. 3 in Batumi were refusing to attend court hearings due to a long distance to the court. Often times reasons the prisoner are unaware of the reasons of moving them from one institution to another. Moreover, the Penitentiary Department refuses to inform the Public Defender’s Office about the reasons of transfer. Normally, a template letter from the Penitentiary Department will say that a prisoner has been transferred from one institution to another on the basis of a confidential letter of the institution’s director. The European Court of Human Rights has explained that a decision to transfer a prisoner from one establishment to another must be reasoned and must serve a legitimate goal. The frequent moving of a prisoner from one institution to another, depending on the specific circumstances of the case, may result in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.59 In its 2013 Report to the Parliament, the Public Defender recommended to the Minister of Corrections that prisoners be made aware of the grounds and reasons for moving them from one institution to another and the relevant minutes be drawn up; also, 56 57 58 59 The European Prison Rules, Rule 17.1 Standards of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT/Inf/E (2002) 1 - Rev. 2013). See judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in Ospina Vargas v. Italy, Vintman v. Ukraine, Messina v. Italy). Khider v. France, Judgment of 9 July 2009 42 NATIONAL PREVENTIVE MECHANISM OF GEORGIA