A/57/173 confirmed by States’ practice, the following basic legal safeguards should remain in fact in any legislation relating to arrest and detention, including any type of anti-terrorist legislation: the right to habeas corpus, the right to have access to a lawyer within 24 hours from the time of arrest and the right to inform a relative or friend about the detention. These safeguards guarantee the access of any person in detention to the outside world and thus ensure his or her humane treatment while in detention. B. Places of pre-trial detention 19. The Special Rapporteur has been informed that some laws would allow security and other forces carrying out the investigation, in particular police, to request the transfer of an accused person from judicial custody to their custody for a period of time for the purposes of further investigation. As stated by his predecessor, the Special Rapporteur recommends that those legally arrested should not be held in facilities under the control of their interrogators or investigators for more than the time required by law to obtain a judicial warrant of pre-trial detention which, in any case, should not exceed a period of 48 hours. They should accordingly be transferred to a pre-trial facility under a different authority at once, after which no further unsupervised contact with the interrogators or investigators should be permitted.19 20. The Special Rapporteur would also recommend that at the time of arrest, a person should undergo a medical inspection, and that medical inspections should be repeated regularly and should be compulsory upon transfer to another place of detention.20 The Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners also recommend that the medical officer shall see and examine every prisoner as soon as possible after his admission and thereafter as necessary (rule 24). C. Length of pre-trial detention 21. National judicial authorities must also ensure that the detention of an accused person pending trial does not exceed a reasonable time, taking into consideration whether there exists a genuine requirement of public interest justifying, with due regard to the principle of presumption of innocence, a departure from the rule of respect for individual liberty. The persistence of reasonable suspicion that the person arrested has 8 committed an offence is a condition sine qua non for the validity of the arrest in the first place and then of the continuation of the detention. Special diligence must prevail in any criminal proceedings. The Special Rapporteur would like to recall that the exigencies of dealing with terrorist criminal activities cannot justify interpreting the notion of the “reasonableness” of the suspicion on which an arrest and then a detention may be based, to the point of impairing its very meaning. According to the Human Rights Committee, pre-trial detention should be an exception and as short as possible. 21 Regular periodic review of the lawfulness and continuing necessity of the detention should thus be carried out by an independent and impartial court of law with a view to re-examining the reasonableness of the suspicion on which the detention is based. D. Confessions and evidence 22. Fears have been expressed that confessions or evidence extracted by illegal means during interrogation would be admissible in court when dealing with terrorist charges. The Special Rapporteur would like to recall article 15 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which clearly states that “any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made”. Accordingly, the previous Special Rapporteur has constantly recommended that no statement of confession made by a person deprived of liberty, other than one made in presence of a judge or a lawyer, should have a probative value in court, except as evidence against those who are accused of having obtained the confession by unlawful means. Serious consideration should be given to introducing video- and audiotaping of proceedings in interrogation rooms.22 He further recommended that each interrogation should be initiated with the identification of all persons present, and that all interrogation sessions should be recorded and preferably videorecorded. The identity of all persons present should be included in the records, and evidence from non-recorded interrogations should be excluded from court proceedings. 23 It should be noted that the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers provide that all persons are entitled to call upon the assistance of a lawyer of their choice to protect and establish their rights and to defend them in all stages of