E/CN.4/1998/38/Add.2 page 8 while reiterating the authorities' wish to eradicate a practice which had been so prevalent in previous decades, and commenting on the positive effect of constantly challenging it and exposing it before public opinion. 23. In a report of October 1997, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) stated that since its inception in June 1990 it had received 2,109 complaints of torture, but that the number of complaints of torture received had been decreasing from year to year, which tended to indicate that the practice itself had also decreased. 4 There were no overall figures which combined CNDH data with those of state commissions. For the period between May 1996 and May 1997, the CNDH noted that it had received 46 complaints, only 25 of which were admissible. The remainder were referred to the state commissions because they concerned non-federal public servants or because the CNDH declared itself incompetent, on the grounds that the judiciary had already assessed the alleged cases of torture. The public servants allegedly responsible for the acts of torture contained in the above 25 complaints belonged to the following offices and bodies: Office of the Attorney-General of the Republic, 13 cases; Ministry of Defence, 5; Office of the Government Procurator of the Federal District, offices of the Government Procurators of the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Nayarit, San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas, 1 case each; and the Secretariat for Public Security of the Federal District, the General Directorate of Public Security of the state of Tabasco and the Office of the Secretary-General of the Government of the state of Guerrero, 1 case. 5 24. The President of the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District (CDHDF) said that up to five years ago torture had undoubtedly been the number one form of abuse of power in the whole country and that confessions used to be extracted under torture, and torture was used as a punishment in the prisons as a matter of routine. That situation, however, had changed. The number of cases and thus of complaints had fallen significantly throughout the country, although there were differences between the states; the situation was not the same in the Federal District as in Guerrero, Oaxaca or Aguascalientes. This factor, he said, should be taken into account in any objective diagnosis of the situation. In the Federal District the decrease had been noteworthy. Even in the prisons cases of torture were sporadic. Since its inception in 1993, the CDHDF had received 56 complaints of torture, which had gone down to thirty-first place in the table of complaints. As a follow-up to those complaints, the Commission had issued 10 recommendations in cases where torture had been proved and 34 preliminary investigations had been initiated. 25. Non-governmental sources indicated that the drop in the number of cases registered by the CNDH were due in part to the fact that 32 local human rights commissions had been established since 1992, one for each state, plus the Federal District Commission, which had led to a genuine decrease in the total number of complaints submitted to CNDH and therefore in complaints of torture as a whole. Moreover, not all the cases reported to CNDH in which torture had occurred were classified as such. Sometimes the recommendation was presented under the heading of injuries, abuse of authority, or, when the complaint had been made from inside a prison, the CNDH classified its recommendation as a