THE PANDEMIC AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN PLACES OF DETENTION The year 2020 has made a unique mark on the history of every institution in every country. The announcement of the pandemic and the introduction of numerous restrictions influencing the exercise of the rights and freedoms of societies across the world raise many questions regarding the necessity for those restrictions as well as their effectiveness. The pandemic has also become a pretext, or a justification, for introducing excessive and ungrounded measures restricting the rights of individuals without contributing to their security. The pandemic has brought about special challenges for the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture which, during its direct or online visits to places of detention, monitored the observance of anti-torture guarantees, including the right of access to a lawyer, the right to have a third person informed about the detention, the right of access to an interpreter and to a doctor, the right to information, and the possibility of lodging a complaint. The NMPT conducted monitoring visits to prisons, remand prisons, rooms for detained persons, police stations, juvenile correctional facilities, juvenile educational centres, nursing homes for persons with disabilities, social care homes, a guarded centre for foreigners, and a sobering-up station. Special attention was paid to quarantine facilities. The dynamics of infections and the observance of human rights of persons living in social care homes were also analysed. The situations of persons deprived of their liberty in various forms and at various places required numerous measures, particularly due to the fact that those places were forgotten. The identified violations and cases of non-compliance with anti-torture guarantees were the reasons for numerous general intervention letters and statements of the NMPT. They concerned, inter alia, the introduction of the crime of torture into the penal law, the unacceptable brutalization of police actions, and violations of the law in the field of the use of direct coercion measures, including the use of gas, handcuffs, etc. The regulations regarding the pandemic made it possible to amend the Act on the Prison Service and to introduce the possibility for the service to use electric weapons. The amendment caused a strong reaction of the Commissioner for Human Rights already at the stage of the legislative works. Starting from August 2020, numerous peaceful assemblies were held in connection with the Margot case and then with the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of October 2020 regarding abortion. The NMPT, when assessing the related actions of the police, emphasized the disproportionate and unjustified use of force against the demonstrators. Those actions of the police clearly violated Polish and international law. This report describes the NMPT actions taken with regard to many entities managing detention places as well as state institutions responsible for this area of functioning of the state. Of significance 6