mit a proposal to the 2013 Conference of the Heads of Office, to be held in Freiburg on 24 and 25 April. The Federal Agency and the Joint Commission operate in a trusting and cooperative manner, collaborating to carry out their shared task. They are submitting the following Report jointly. The results from 2012 can be summed up as follows: Standard for inspections The standard for inspections applied by the National Agency is primarily German law on the protection of human dignity, but also supranational law. By carrying out regular inspections of places where people are – or can be – deprived of their liberty, structures and conditions can be identified which may encourage contraventions. On the basis of its inspection visits, the National Agency issued a large number of recommendations to improve the situation of persons being detained by the supervisory authorities. The Federal Agency The Federal Agency reached the positive conclusion on its visits that many of the recommendations from previous Annual Reports (e.g. keeping all common information forms in a large number of languages) have already been taken up and implemented in many offices of the Federal Police and of the Federal Armed Forces. There is nevertheless still room for improvement. The Federal Agency will continue to attach considerable significance to the further training of officers aimed at communicating strategies to deescalate critical situations. The Joint Commission The spotlight of the inspection visits made by the Joint Commission so far has been on visits to prisons and police units of the Länder. By contrast, it was only possible to visit individual psychiatric clinics; the Joint Commission does not yet have any specialist experts of its own in this field. It has not yet been possible to visit any homes for the elderly or long-term care homes at all. 1. Prisons Many of the recommendations made by the Joint Commission are linked to the state of construction of the facilities. One striking case is the double occupancy of a cell without a partitioned off toilet. This means that inmates have to use the toilet in the presence of their fellow inmates, a curtain or screen not protecting privacy. This is also not acceptable according to the case-law of the Federal Constitutional Court. 8