ACHPR/37/OS/11/437 11 involved in the administration of prisons. Legislation 92/052 of 27 January 1992 governs the penitentiary in the country. Under the authority of a principal administrator, there is a Prison Service Directorate with sub-departments for prison studies, administration, organisation and production, staff and health. There are three main categories of prisons: central prisons, located in the capital city of the provinces, principal prisons which are linked to magistrates courts accommodating all categories including pre-trial prisoners, and secondary prisons that only accommodate sentenced prisoners and are spread across the country. The prison administration has about 72 prisons in total. This figure, however, does not include other detention centres and/or Gendarmerie, run by the Ministry of Defence and/or the Delegation for National Security. Two types of penal regimes are being applied in the country. The Common law based Penal Code, which is applied in the Anglophone areas while Criminal Prosecution Code, which is applied in the Francophone regions. Legal assistance is provided for in the law, but practically, due to its being poorly remunerated, not too many lawyers are willing to provide such a service. Under Cameroonian law, many authorities can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty without much control nor time limitation. Such officials as governors, préfets, sous-préfets and chiefs of districts can arrest people for 15 days of “garde à vue” (police custody), which can be indefinitely renewed. Conditions of detention Prison population It was not possible to establish a figure for the total population of convicted prisoners and those on remand ahead of the mission. The Special Rapporteur wishes to note that some figures for these two categories held in prison were supplied to the delegation later without any difficulty by the prison authorities. Due to the unavailability of comprehensive figures, however, the delegation had to work on the basis of estimates supplied by the prison administration without being able to confirm them. In prisons The Special Rapporteur was provided with the following rough statistics depicting the size of prison population at the places the delegation visited.