■■ The Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment; ■■ The Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officers; ■■ The Principles of Medical Ethics relevant to the Role of Health Personnel, particularly Physicians, in the Protection of Prisoners and Detainees against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and ■■ The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules). The above-mentioned Covenant and Convention are legally binding on countries that have ratified them. While NHRIs are encouraged to apply the other standards too, these are not legally binding. It is necessary for the institution to review the applicable standards carefully to determine what should be covered in the monitoring exercise. It may be that certain rights or standards are generally well protected in some States and therefore do not need to be included. Some issues may be more relevant to one country than another, so the institution will have to decide which issues it will actively monitor. 1. Planning the monitoring activity All places of detention should be included to reinforce prevention and to ensure that the standards are applied uniformly across the country. This should include unofficial detention and interrogations sites. Places of detention should be visited more than once. This is necessary to measure the progress made, individually and collectively, as well as to ensure that the situation in places of detention does not deteriorate because the NHRI has shifted its focus elsewhere. Much of the work involved in monitoring places of detention will focus on result indicators. In this connection, monitoring tools are needed. Many institutions use checklists to compile information on the human rights situation of detainees, which help to define the scope of the monitoring exercise and ensure that monitors concentrate on issues that are relevant for the country. Checklists also standardize data and help ensure that data are comparable and trends can be identified. Moreover, using “controlled vocabulary” can help ensure consistent data compilation and facilitate analysis. Controlled vocabulary means that the monitor uses a list of terms or descriptors that is as exhaustive and mutually exclusive as possible, where preferred terms are used by those collecting data and analysing the information. Advance planning can ensure relatively comprehensive and controlled use of that information. It can, conversely, prevent overly narrow or rigid approaches, enabling NHRIs to judge the scale of the problem. For example, the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners require, in normal circumstances, that there should be only one person to a cell or room. A tool that records only whether that standard is met will not gather important data on the scale and severity of any overcrowding or assess if it is more severe in some regions than in others or in some types of places of detention. National human rights institutions should also include process indicators to ensure that the rights of detainees are protected: information on these must be collected. The Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners require a complaints system for detainees, for instance. Other standards include providing specific human rights training to officials who come in contact with detainees. Planning for monitoring should identify the main process indicators that apply in the local circumstances. There should also be a process for families of detained persons to report irregularities to the NHRI, if it has a complaints procedure. National actions may also support efforts by the international human rights system, especially the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. 122