A/HRC/13/39/Add.5 While I do not want to exclude that this has been the case per se, it further highlights the need for a chain of documentation without any gap. 86. With regard to informing family members and lawyers, I can conclude that the delay in notification is not limited to exceptional circumstances, as international standards would require, but de facto a standard practice in several countries. While solitary confinement and restricted visiting rights may be legitimate for the shortest possible amount of time to ensure an effective investigation during the early investigation phase, it is difficult to see any valid justification for the denial to inform family members and lawyer of the arrest, particularly in the case of non-serious crimes. When discussing with officials of police stations or pre-trial facilities I realized that the lack of notification of family members or lawyers was not for a security or investigation purpose, but simply due to a mix of negligence and disrespect for the rights of detainees. Much more often than I would have initially expected, detainees urged me to inform their wives or husbands, parents or employers that they were held in police custody. 87. As far as registration is concerned, authorities frequently registered detainees only from the point of time when the arrest was officially proclaimed, but not from the moment when the person was de facto deprived of his or her liberty. Such an approach evidently misses the nature of the safeguard and hides behind an ill-guided formalism which opens ample opportunities for abuse. Numerous detainees reported that they were earlier held under “retention”, “summoned for questioning”, or similar provisions for prolonged periods of time before the arrest was made official. In other cases, authorities provided the time of arrival at the police station as the moment of arrest, and not the moment in which the person was actually apprehended. In both cases, a significant amount of time during which the detainee is already under the control of the police remains officially unaccounted for. It is during these periods that persons were most often tortured, be it already at the premises of the police station or during transfer. Official arrest was only pronounced once a person had already been ill-treated and forced to confess. Finally, custody registers hardly ever contained any reference to the medical state of the detainee. (ii) Length of police custody 88. As already emphasised previously, detainees are under a particularly high risk of being tortured when held in police custody. Suspects mostly find themselves in the hands of those officers who are also in charge of investigating the crime at stake and have therefore an interest in obtaining a confession or other information needed to solve the crime. In order to keep this critical phase as short as possible, international human rights law requires that any person arrested or detained on the suspicion of having committed a crime has to be brought “promptly” before a judge or another officer authorized by law to exercise judicial powers.53 Subsequently, the person has to be released or, if arrest is sanctioned, transferred to a pre-trial detention facility which is ideally under a different authority than the police. While it is left to States to stipulate precise time limits for police detention, the Human Rights Committee has made clear that delays may not exceed “a few days”.54 89. Summarizing my experiences, I have to conclude that suspects are held in police custody much longer than international human rights law would provide for. First, in many of the States visited, the domestic legal framework already provides for periods in police custody which in my opinion are not compatible with the limit of a maximum of a few days. This finding holds particularly true for regulations which provide for extended police custody in “exceptional circumstances” since their application tends to become a matter of 53 54 26 ICCPR, article 9(3). Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 8, 30 June 1982. Human Rights Committee General Comment No. 8, para. 2.