A/HRC/13/39/Add.5 should not be interpreted as “naming and shaming” those few countries which I was able to visit thanks to their generous invitation and cooperation, but as a mere illustration of a situation that seems to be representative for most countries. Secondly, I am grateful to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva for always supporting my mandate in a most effective manner and providing me with highly motivated and professional staff. Thirdly, without the effective support and cooperation of a considerable number of international and domestic NGOs as well as courageous human rights defenders in many countries, it would have been impossible to regularly send allegation letters and urgent appeals to Governments and to carry out highly difficult and complex fact-finding missions in all regions. Fourthly, I wish to thank the Governments of Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and other donors who supported the creation of a remarkable team of highly professional and dedicated human rights experts at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights at Vienna University. Finally, I am deeply impressed by the courage of so many victims and witnesses, both in detention and outside, who provided me with information about prison conditions and with detailed accounts about their own suffering at the hands of ruthless torturers and their superiors in too many countries. Unfortunately, many of these courageous women, men and children had to suffer reprisals for the mere fact of having been willing to speak to me and to provide me with the information necessary to carry out my mandate and to inform the United Nations about the reality of torture and ill-treatment around the world. 9. This reality is alarming. Despite the fact that torture constitutes one of the most brutal attacks on human dignity and one of the most serious human rights crimes, and notwithstanding the absolute prohibition of torture and ill-treatment even in the most exceptional circumstances, such as war, internal disturbances and terrorism, torture and illtreatment are widespread practices in the majority of the countries on our planet. Almost no society is immune against torture, but in many societies torture is practiced systematically, both in fighting ordinary crime and in combating terrorism, extremism or similar politically motivated offences. In addition, conditions of detention are appalling in the vast majority of countries and must often be qualified as cruel, inhuman and degrading. Detainees, whether convicted criminals, persons accused of a crime in police custody and pre-trial detention, migrants in an irregular situation and asylum seekers in detention pending deportation, patients in psychiatric hospitals or children in closed institutions, are among the most vulnerable and forgotten human beings in our societies. As soon as people are locked up, whether for justified or less justified reasons, society loses interest in their fate. “If you are behind bars, you must have done something wrong”, is one of the oldest stereotypes of our societies. It totally overlooks the fact that the criminal justice systems in most countries are not functioning properly, and that detainees often have no effective access to any independent judicial review of their detention (habeas corpus) or similar complaints and control mechanisms. Prison walls and fences lock people up and society out. Because of punitive justice systems, detainees have very little contact with the outside world, and society has no interest in the fate of detainees. Prison conditions seem to be one of the last taboos, even in so-called “open societies”. B. Country missions 10. During the last five years, I carried out fact-finding missions to the following countries: Georgia (including Abkhazia and South Ossetia), Mongolia, China (including the autonomous regions of Tibet and Qinjang), Nepal, Jordan, Paraguay, Togo, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Denmark (including Greenland), the Republic of Moldova (including Transnistria), Equatorial Guinea, Uruguay and Kazakhstan. Together with other Special Procedures, I prepared studies on the situation of detainees in the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), on the human rights situation in Darfur (Sudan), and on the 5