PROTECTING PEOPLE DEPRIVED OF THEIR LIBERTY • In 2015 the NPM established some progress as regards respect for the rights of people deprived of their liberty in prisons and detention facilities. • Legislative amendments are required in response to the urgent need of treating humanely people deprived of their liberty. • No action has been taken yet to reform provision of medical services in prisons, and the exisiting in-house healthcare system is ineffective and under-resourced. • Action taken to improve material conditions in some of the prisons and detention facilities and to reduce the overcrowding is positively assessed. • Lack of sustainable human and other resources jeopradises the overall reform in places of detention. ACTION TAKEN WITH A VIEW TO CHANGING LEGAL REGULATION In 2015 the Bulgarian authorities paid significant attention to the problems in prisons and detention facilities that had been pointed out time and again by the NPM, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and civil society organisations in the country. In January 2015 the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) ruled the pilot judgment Neshkov and Others v. Bulgaria (in force as of 1 June 2015) finding violations of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) and Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Court ruled that Bulgaria experienced systemic problems with the poor detention conditions and there were no effective remedies (preventive or compensatory) in that respect. The Ombudsman acting as NPM explicitly recommended in the 2014 annual report that preventive and compensatory remedies had to be in place.4 The NPM is of the opinion that having effective remedies in place, in particular a preventive remedy, should be implicit in the general measures for overcoming overcrowding and poor detention conditions. The major hindrance to introducing a preventive remedy are precisley the poor detention conditions as there are no alternative detention facilities offering adequate living conditions. This is why action taken with a view to changing the legal regulation should be matched with adequate action to genuinely improve detention conditions. Under domestic and international pressure to improve conditions in the places of detention, the Ministry of Justice set up a working group tasked with drafting legislative amendments to that end. A member of the NPM took part in the working group. Many of the findings and Annual Report of the Ombudsman acting as National Preventive Mechanism, 2014, p. 53 http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/OPCAT/NPM/BulgariaAnnualReport2014.pdf 4 25