5 b. Procedural, budgetary and legal matters 11. The key elements of the CPT's Rules of Procedure were summarised in the 1st General Report (op. cit. paragraph 12). After a spate of changes during the first year of the Committee's existence, the provisions of the Rules are now quite stable. Since the 1st General Report (which reflected the situation as at 31 January 1991), the only amendment made concerns Rule 42, which deals with the confidential nature of the CPT's visit reports. 12. In principle, of course, the report drawn up after each visit is confidential. However, the State concerned may request the CPT to publish the report or itself proceed to publication. If, in the latter case, the report is not published in its entirety, the Committee may decide to publish the whole report (Rule 42, paragraph 2). In the light of experience, the CPT decided in September 1991 that this rule should be supplemented by another provision (paragraph 3) empowering the Committee to publish the whole report if the State concerned makes a public statement summarising the report or commenting upon its contents. 13. Now that the Committee's Rules of Procedure and general working methods are reasonably wellestablished, it can focus its attention fully on operational activities i.e. the carrying out of visits and related tasks. For CPT members this will involve a certain decrease in their work at plenary session level (it has been decided to reduce the number of Committee meetings in 1992 to four) to be counterbalanced by an increase in work within visiting delegations. As far as possible, meetings of visiting delegations will be clustered around plenary sessions. However, as the number of visits increases, it will become more and more frequent for meetings of visiting delegations (and in particular post-visit meetings to discuss the draft visit report) to be held independently of plenary sessions. 14. The CPT wishes to record its gratitude to the Secretary General and the Committee of Ministers for having accepted its budgetary requests for 1991 and, more recently, 1992. The Committee has a firm financial basis upon which to carry out its activities. Moreover, the Committee's Secretariat is gradually being strengthened. Two A grade officials joined the Secretariat during 1991, bringing the total number of staff to eight (see Appendix 2, Part B), and it is due to be reinforced in 1992 by the arrival of a documentalist/research assistant. The CPT very much hopes that it will be possible for an additional A grade official to be appointed to its Secretariat as from 1 January 1993. This will enable the Committee to envisage a further increase in its activities during that year (see also paragraph 28). In this connection, the CPT must reiterate that the Secretariat has an essential role to play in the preparation and carrying out of visits and the subsequent drawing up of visit reports, as well as in the pursuance of the ongoing dialogue with States visited.