opcat inspections in 2019 14 OPCAT inspections in 2019 One of the most important features of the Parliamentary Ombudsmen’s OPCAT activities is the inspections of places where people may be held deprived of their liberty. In planning the inspections carried out in 2019, the ambition was for the inspection work to have a large geographical spread. As in previous years, a number of inspections have been made of establishments that have either not previously been inspected by the Parliamentary Ombudsmen or have not been inspected for a long time. Much of the Parliamentary Ombudsmen’s traditional supervisory work and its assignment in accordance with OPCAT overlap and complement one another. For this reason, as a rule, the OPCAT Unit’s employees participate in inspections by supervisory divisions of places where people may be held deprived of their liberty. For the same reason, employees from the different supervisory divisions regularly participate in the inspections that the OPCAT Unit is tasked to carry out. 2.1 Method In the annual report 2015-2017, there are details of the method used in an OPCAT inspection.1 In addition to inspections, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen also held two dialogue meetings with representatives of the Prison and Probation Service and the National Board of Institutional Care in 2019. In addition, Parliamentary Ombudsmen employees visited the Health and Social Care Inspectorate’s six regional departments. A dialogue meeting was then held with the Health and Social Care Inspectorate’s Director General. In December 2019, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen also held a meeting to establish a forum for dialogue on the rights of individuals deprived of their liberty. The Parliamentary Ombudsmen invited a number of representatives of actors in civil society who, in various ways, have contact with individuals deprived of their liberty. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the modality of a forum which enables the Parliamentary Ombudsmen to have a regular dialogue with civil society actors concerning the rights and situations of individuals held deprived of their liberty. The response from the participants was positive and, following the meeting, the Chief Parliamentary Ombudsman decided to set up the forum. The first meeting of this new forum took place in 1 See National Preventive Mechanism – NPM, Report from the OPCAT Unit 2015-2017 p. 16 and 17.