One of the impediments to the realisatioin of the right to visits is the ignorance of places of residence while making decisions on placement of prisoners in penitentiary institutions. Prisoners from Eastern Georgia who serve their sentences in penitentiaries located in Western Georgia are the ones who most often experience problems related to the rights to visitations. This category of prisoners also have problems with meeting their lawyers. It is worth noting that the monitoring by the National Preventive Mechanisms found that a massive transfer of prisoners to west Georgia’s penitentiaries took place during the reporting period. Normally, neither transferred prisoners nor Public Defender’s representatives are notified on the grounds for the transfer from one institution to another. This issue has been repeatedly raised in many reports prepared by the Public Defender’s Office. According to Rule 24.1 of the European Prison Rules should be allowed to communicate as often as possible by letter, telephone or other forms of communication with their families, other persons and representatives of outside organisations and to receive visits from these persons while Rule 24.5 states that prison authorities must assist prisoners in maintaining adequate contact with the outside world and provide them with the appropriate welfare support to do so. Due to the fact that because of the absence of adequate infrastructure in most of closed institutions prisoners are not able to exercise their right to long-term visits. Nor is one short-term visit in a room divided with glass partitions sufficient to support prisoners to maintain full contact with their families. Therefore it is of utmost importance that the legislation be amended so that prisoners serving their sentences in closed institutions are allowed extra short-term visit. Overall 44 631 short term visits were paid in penitentiary institutions during 2014. The table below shows the breakdon of this figure according to the institutions: Institution Number of Visits Institution N2 6020 Institution N3 276 Institution N5 1374 Institution N6 2077 Institution N7 345 Institution N8 7950 Institution N9 552 Institution N11 909 Institution N12 1690 Institution N14 2940 NATIONAL PREVENTIVE MECHANISM OF GEORGIA 145