20 years of combating torture: CPT General Report 2008-2009 4. There are also a number of regions in Europe in which the central authorities are not, or not fully, in effective control, and the CPT has so far had only partial success in exercising its preventive mandate in these areas. The Committee has been able to operate in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria as well as in Kosovo, in the latter case on the basis of a specific Agreement between the Council of Europe and the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo. The CPT also recently succeeded in organising its first visit to the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia. In contrast, attempts by the CPT to visit the corresponding region of South Ossetia have failed to date. Further, the Committee’s repeated efforts to organise a visit to the northern part of Cyprus have so far been fruitless, and it has also yet to visit the breakaway Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Regrettably, legalistic obstacles are frequently raised when the CPT seeks to operate in the above-mentioned regions, obstacles which appear on occasion to be politically motivated. The CPT wishes to emphasise that its mandate is entirely apolitical. The Committee’s only objective in seeking to go to these areas is to strengthen the protection of individuals against torture and other forms of ill-treatment; surely that is in the true interests of all parties involved. 5. The geographical enlargement of the CPT’s activities has been accompanied by an enlargement of the Committee’s work in terms of the types of places visited. At the outset, CPT visits were centred mainly on police and prison establishments. However, the Committee has progressively explored in depth the whole gamut of deprivation of liberty, from involuntary placement in psychiatric establishments to the administrative detention of foreigners under aliens legislation, detention centres for juveniles and social welfare establishments for the mentally disabled or elderly. Visits have been organised to military detention facilities as well, though this is one category of place of deprivation of liberty that arguably should receive more attention from the Committee. In recent years, the CPT has also increasingly carried out visits focused on specific categories of inmates, such as remand prisoners held in conditions of isolation, life-sentenced prisoners and persons placed in high-security units. 6. The CPT has gradually developed a corpus of standards on safeguards against illtreatment and conditions of detention, as regards both persons deprived of their liberty in general and detained persons belonging to particularly vulnerable groups. These standards have in large part been made public through substantive sections in the Committee’s General Reports. The CPT is pleased to note that the standards have had an influence on various Council of Europe instruments, such as the Twenty guidelines on forced return of 2005, the revised European Prison Rules (2006), the European Rules for juvenile offenders (2008) and the Guidelines on human rights protection in the context of accelerated asylum procedures (2009). The CPT also greatly welcomes the increasing reference being made in judgments of the European Court of Human Rights to the Committee’s standards as well as to the specific findings in its country visit reports. 8