During the monitoring carried out by the Special Preventive Group, some of the prisoners complained about the lack of access to normative acts in penitentiary establishments.256 There have been occasions where prisoners applied to the Office of the Public Defender of Georgia and requested a particular normative act. The Public Defender considers it imperative to ensure prisoners’ access to automatically updated and codified bases of normative acts and to register the acceptance and delivery of normative acts by prisoners in penitentiary establishments. In 2015, the Public Defender of Georgia recommended to the Minister of Corrections of Georgia to take all necessary measures to ensure that prisoners always received the registration number of their applications/complaints lodged in a timely manner. In the opinion of the Public Defender, this recommendation has been partially fulfilled. In particular, the monitoring conducted by the Special Preventive Group in 2016 showed that the majority of the prisoners were informed about the registration number of their applications/complaints lodged. However, some of the prisoners in the closed-type penitentiary establishments mentioned that in cases where they sent an open letter, no registration number was provided. In such cases, it is difficult to track the letter, whether it was registered or dispatched to the respective recipient. Besides, the monitoring showed that in penitentiary establishment no. 3, registration number is only provided to a prisoner if the latter submits an application and requests it. Such practice is impermissible. The statute of penitentiary establishment no. 3 stipulates that an application is registered with an administrative unit of the penitentiary establishment and the registration number is given to the remand/convicted person having lodged the application.257 The statute nowhere stipulates the need for submitting a separate application by the prisoner to obtain the registration number. During the monitoring conducted by the Special Preventive Group, some of the prisoners expressed their concern that despite having had submitted a letter to a social worker, they did not have any information about this communication. According to the prisoners, they do not have a written document by which they would be able to prove the fact that the letters had been handed to social workers. As the fact of handing open letters to social workers is not corroborated by any written document that would be accessible for the prisoners submitting those letters, it is difficult to establish whether a prisoner gave correspondence to a social worker. Therefore, the Public Defender of Georgia deems it reasonable to ensure that during delivery and accep256 In order to inspect the issue at stake, monitoring was conducted in penitentiary establishments and the results show that there are indeed problems related to the accessibility of legislative/normative acts in establishments. For instance, as of 12-13 January 2017, when the Special Preventive Group visited penitentiary establishment no. 6, its library had four copies of the establishment’s statute; ten copies of the changes made to the statute on 27 December 2016; ten copies of the Imprisonment Code (not updated); four copies of the Constitution of Georgia (as of 2016); one copy of the statute of the closed-type penitentiary establishment; one copy of Order no. 70 of the Minister of Corrections of Georgia of 9 July 2015; one copy of the Criminal Code of Georgia (as of 2005); and one copy of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Georgia (as of 2006, hence, invalidated). As of 17 February 2017, there was only one old copy of the Imprisonment Code in the library of penitentiary establishment no. 11. 257 Order no. 109 of the Minister of Corrections of Georgia on approving the statute of penitentiary establishment no. 3 of the Ministry of Corrections of Georgia, Article 63.3. NATIONAL PREVENTIVE MECHANISM (NPM), 2016 121