Effective prevention of torture and other forms of ill-treatment by police officers requires that the police operation culture be changed and re-oriented towards the respect for human rights. Police officers should react to any ill-treatment of people by other officers. Violence against people remaining under police supervision should be perceived as a violation of human rights and an unacceptable lack of professionalism, which affects the image of the police service as a whole. INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION An important element of the operation and development of the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture is the participation of its representatives in various events on the national and international level. This way, the NMPT emphasizes its role as a body that protects the rights of persons deprived of their liberty, as well as gains new experience stemming from cooperation with other entities operating in this area. The activities of the Commissioner for Human Rights as the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture are also one of the areas of the CHR’s international cooperation. In the conditions of the epidemic, international meetings were held online. In 2020, representatives of the NMPT participated e.g. in: a conference on the monitoring of deportation flights from Italy and other European countries; seminars on the exercise of the NMPT mandate during the coronavirus pandemic, including an expert webinar on the challenges in the field of monitoring the situation of persons living in psychiatric care institutions in the era of the COVID pandemic-1914; a webinar entitled Penal Reform International devoted to the challenges faced by prisons during the pandemic; a training on violence in prisons15; the public hearing of the candidates for the UN Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture; the conference on Prison Monitoring Methodologies for National Preventive Mechanisms, and the SPT session on the work of the national preventive mechanisms during the pandemic16. Also, on 16 June 2020 an international webinar was held which was organized by the Commissioner for Human Rights in cooperation with ODIHR, experts from the Omega Research foundation and the University of Exeter. The meeting was devoted to the use of electric weapons by Prison Service officers in the light of the service’s new right to use such weapons under the special Act on COVID-19. The workshop participants spoke about the conditions of permissibility to use electric weapons and about their impact on the health of people against whom such weapons are used. 14 The seminars were organized by the Geneva Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT). The meeting was held within the project Towards the European Union’s harmonized standards of deprivation of liberty - the role of national preventive mechanisms. 15 16 The closed meeting was held as part of the 41st session of the SPT. 19