E/CN.4/2002/77/Add.2 page 7 for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in resolution 43/173 on 9 December 1988, and mentioned in the Group’s methods of work. 11. Among the most significant situations the delegation considered, one stands out. After the Working Group’s adoption of opinion No. 6/1998 on 14 May 1998, the Government challenged some of the points the Group had made. By letter dated 7 September 1998 (ref. No. 9/23-266), for instance, it stressed that “… Appellants have the right to appoint lawyers to represent them at any time after their arrest, but in practice often wait until they [get] to the Court when the Court is then bound by law to appoint a Defence Lawyer for them free of charge”. The delegation discovered that, while many of the former detainees had indeed had a lawyer, mostly one automatically assigned to them, this was only for the judgement hearing, almost never for the decisive phase of the inquiry (pre-trial detention), owing to pressure from some investigators who claimed that there was no point in giving them the assistance of a lawyer at the opening of the inquiry since, whatever transpired, for the first three months the Interior Minister alone could decide, without appeal, whether an arrestee should be detained. 12. Another of the Working Group’s concerns that was confirmed by these interviews was that the principle of equality of arms was violated. Two situations of this kind caught the delegation’s attention: (a) Invocation of article 3.4 of the Legislative Decree on State Security Measures, which permitted the State Security Court to set aside testimony for the defence on the grounds that it did not relate to the matter at issue, whereas no such option was available against the State prosecutor; (b) Another breach of the principle of equality of arms: the lawyer was not given the file until shortly before the hearing – sometimes only the night before – while the State prosecutor, being a part of the Ministry of the Interior, had access to the whole of the file throughout the proceedings. 13. Moreover, article 5, paragraph 9 (b), of Legislative Decree No. 7/1976 held that confessions outweighed other evidence as “proof positive”, and this is doubtless the reason why at the time confessions were frequently extracted under torture, especially, according to consistent accounts, at the Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) holding cells and at Al-Quala Fort, the aim being to provide the Court with a file of full written confessions. The Working Group wishes to draw attention here to its opinion No. 34/1994, in which it stated that a conviction based on confessions obtained under torture not only represented a violation of article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which prohibits torture, but also rendered the resulting detention arbitrary. II. RESUMPTION OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RULE OF LAW (1999-2004) 14. In the light of the foregoing, the Working Group was very pleased to learn of the recent acts of clemency and reforms, such as it had been calling for in its decisions and opinions. These important developments had come about: