22 5. Performing the NPM’s tasks According to Article 19 of the OPCAT, the NPM’s task is to regularly examine the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty in places of detention as defined in Article 4, with a view to strengthening, if necessary, their protection against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. According to Article 30, Paragraph (1) of the Fundamental Law, the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights shall perform fundamental rights protection activities, his or her proceedings may be initiated by anyone. However, while performing the tasks of the NPM, I have to regularly examine the treatment of the persons deprived of their liberty in places of detention as defined in Article 4 of the OPCAT even in the absence of a petition or suspected impropriety.66 The main objective of the NPM’s visits is to determine which elements of the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty might lead to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and how to prevent them. Another important task is to make recommendations in order to prevent them from happening or recurring.67 Since the NPM’s task is not the ex post investigation of activities or omissions causing fundamental rights-related improprieties, but the prevention of the ill-treatment of persons deprived of their liberty, the Department does not handle individual complaints. Whenever my colleagues received an individual complaint during the visits, or an individual complaint was filed on the NPM’S homepage, those complaints would be forwarded by the Department to the competent organizational units of my Office. Although investigating complaints received via the NPM’s homepage is not the Department’s responsibility, studying them provides guidelines for selecting the sites to visit and the inspection criteria. 5.1. Access to the places of detention, timing the visits By virtue of Article 20, Paragraphs (b) and (c) of the OPCAT, the NPM shall be granted access to all places of detention, their installations and facilities, as well as to all information referring to the treatment of those persons as well as their conditions of detention. In 2015, the NPM visited all places of detention without prior notice. The timing of inspections was usually adjusted to the official work schedule. The timing of visits to certain institutions where especially vulnerable detainees had been placed was adjusted to the peculiarities of the given place of detention. For example, the visit to the police lockups on Aradi and Gyorskocsi streets in Budapest started late in the night, while the inspection of the Psychiatric Ward of the Merényi Hospital started at 5 a.m. Thanks to the society-wide recognition of the ombudsman institution and the publicity campaign conducted as part of the NPM’s establishment, our visiting delegations had unrestricted access to all places of detention. See Section 39/B, Subsection (1) of the Ombudsman Act See Clause 5 of the Report on the Visit of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to The Maldives (February 26, 2009) 66 67