Foreword Since 2011, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen have fulfilled their role as National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT). The regular inspections of places where people are deprived of their liberty are an important part of that work and is an issue that the Parliamentary Ombudsmen have also previously focused on in their regular mandate. In 2019, we carried out 34 inspections in total of places where people are held deprived of their liberty. The majority of these were of the Prison and Probation Service’s remand prisons and prisons. One of the reasons why a relatively large part of the OPCAT activities concerned the Prison and Probation Service was the strained occupancy situation in remand prisons and prisons in 2019. There is always a risk that overcrowding will lead to negative consequences for inmates, and it was, therefore, necessary to examine the situation through a number of inspections. The strained occupancy situation has continued into 2020 and the Parliamentary Ombudsmen will have reason to return to this issue. In addition to the inspections, we held a number of dialogue meetings with representatives of the Prison and Probation Service, the National Board of Institutional Care, and the Health and Social Care Inspectorate during the year. These dialogue meetings are a method being tested in order to, in a more concentrated manner, discuss the important observations made in the framework of the inspections. These meetings may concern questions regarding the application by the agencies of the various legislative provisions on coercive measures, as well as other issues concerning legal certainty that are important for persons deprived of their liberty. The intention is that these dialogue meetings help clarify the importance of the agencies addressing issues raised regularly during various inspections. One of the dialogue meetings, held in March 2019, concerned the possibilities for inmates held on remand to associate with other inmates during the daytime and the Prison and Probation Service’s work with isolation-breaking measures. At the end of February 2020, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen published a report on the isolation of inmates in the Prison and Probation Service’s remand prisons. A summary of this report can be found in Section 8 of this report. Issuing reports based on the OPCAT activities is also a priority. The idea is that the observations and statements made by the individual Parliamentary Ombudsmen regarding the conditions for individuals deprived of their liberty should be more accessible and clear when presented together in an annual or thematic report. As such, the reports themselves become an important part of the preventive work. Finally, I would like to draw attention to the fact that, as I write this foreword, there is an ongoing pandemic. Covid-19 has affected all parts of society, and the agencies responsible for individuals deprived of their liberty also have taken measures to prevent the spread of infection. In some cases, these measures have restricted the rights and freedoms of individuals deprived of their liberty. The spread of Covid-19 has additionally led the Parliamentary Ombudsmen to review our working methods to ensure the implementation of our role as an NPM. In March 2020, we assessed that, in view of the infection risks, it was not possible to carry out those ordinary inspections we had planned for spring and summer. Instead, we quickly developed new inspection methods in order to fulfil the NPM assignment. The prevention of inhuman treatment of individuals deprived of their liberty can be of particular urgency when society is in crisis and this preventive work must not stop during a pandemic. The question of how individuals deprived of their liberty are affected by, inter alia, agencies’ measures to prevent the spread of infection will be addressed in future reports. Elisabeth Rynning Chief Parliamentary Ombudsman 3