SUMMARY BY THE PUBLIC DEFENDER OF RIGHTS In the thirteenth year of our activities as the national preventive mechanism, we continued conducting systematic visits and implementing long-standing recommendations in the area of prevention of ill-treatment. I provide a brief summary of the most important achievements: We visited a total of 27 facilities. Some of them were visited as part of larger thematic projects: we completed a series of visits to security detention and visits to homes for people with disabilities. Findings obtained from these visits serve as the basis for summary reports, where the report on security detention has already been drawn up and discussed with experts across the Czech Republic. Further to the systematic visits, we renewed monitoring of general psychiatric facilities and prepared a special programme for monitoring of the use of means of restraint. In future, we plan to visit facilities for children placed in institutional education. In accordance with our standard procedure, we begin with an intensive preparation of our team. In Chapters 1 to 6, we summarise our activities in 2018 according to the individual areas of detention. I consider the assessment of conditions of people in security detention to be the most important topic of our current activities. This form of a protective measure has been available under the Czech legislation for 10 years, which means it is a good time to summarise the way it has functioned until now. Therefore, I have decided to also prepare an analysis of court decisions whereby security detention was imposed on inmates who are/have previously been placed in the relevant institutions. We aimed to get a picture of the current situation and establish the ratio between direct imposition of security detention and requalification from forensic treatment. We obtained a completely unique material and legal overview of the current state of security detention. In Chapter 3, we outline only the essential findings and I invite anyone interested to study all our published reports. The visits yielded only a few unambiguous findings on ill-treatment; however, certain risky practices are basically used to some extent by everyone, and the safeguards are insufficient. As in last year’s report, I address this separately in Chapter 7. Foreigner detention facilities and forensic treatment institutions lack independent supervision and protection against potential interference with the inmates’ rights. Recording and reporting of medical findings indicating ill-treatment does not correspond to international standards and is frustrated by the lack of privacy during examinations by physicians. The situation in social services is especially grave as this area lacks an independent complaints mechanism, the State’s inspectors cannot access parts of the documentation kept by service providers and there is a lack of a legal basis to punish infractions. I have found similar problems plaguing psychiatric care. One of the tasks of the Defender is to monitor the detention of foreign nationals and perform monitoring of administrative and court expulsions. We linked this activity with our systematic visits. In 2018, we focused on monitoring of return operations, which are described in more detail in Chapter 2. I sincerely hope this text will prove to be an inspiration to your work.  Anna Šabatová