Report on the Performance of the Activities of the National Preventive Mechanism for 2019 the prisoners, especially the insufficiently transparent method of assessing how successfully individual prison sentence plans are carried out, which is closely tied to awarding privileges, both in the sense of alleviating the conditions within a penal institution, as well as those pertaining to life outside state or county prison. One prisoner, who had for years been denied the privilege of being allowed to share a private room with his spouse without supervision, complained that this led to him being unable to preserve his marriage. Inadequate communication of the competent bodies, making it difficult to plan how to proceed with pre-trial detainees, about which we have written in earlier reports, is still a problem, as could be seen in the case of the 18-year-old pre-trial detainee who died in August 2019 at the Clinical Hospital Centre Split, where he had been transported from the Split County Prison in a very serious condition. Acting in this specific case, we requested the Ministry of Health to carry out inspections of the Prison hospital in Zagreb and the Split County Prison Inadequate communication of competent Healthcare department to ascertain what kind of bodies is still a problem, making it difficult to medical care the detainee was given. The Ministry plan how to proceed with pre-trial detainees. did carry out the inspections, but as we do not yet This could be seen in the case of the 18- have all the established information at our year-old pre-trial detainee who died in Split, in August 2019. disposal, our investigation is still ongoing. However, the prison staff gave us information that they did not know that the person in question was diagnosed with mental and physical impairments due to which he was declared disabled and had the right to assistance and full extent of care – only that he was diagnosed with pyromania, which certainly had an influence on how he was treated. Complaints over the ineffectiveness of legal remedies are still frequent, with prisoners citing not receiving, despite the legal deadline of 15 or 30 days, responses from their prison wardens or the Central Office of the Prison System and Probation Directorate (COPSPD), or that the responses did not cover all the allegations in the complaints, and that it was impossible to determine from the responses what facts and norms constituted the grounds for assessing whether the complaints were founded. Such actions are contrary to international standards, as highlighted by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) in its 2018 Annual Report, and render complaints an ineffective legal remedy. During 2019, prisoners continued to complain to us about the protracted time it took for magistrates responsible for the execution of the sentences to act on requests for judicial protection, in which they're abetted by the Execution of Prison Sentences Act (EPSA), which does not stipulate the deadline within which decisions must be adopted. 5