E/CN.4/2001/66/Add.1 page 12 39. Sultan Salimov was reportedly arrested on 10 May 2000 on suspicion of illegal possession of firearms and taken to the Nizami region police station, from which he was transferred subsequently to police unit No. 24 and to the Sabai region police station No. 8. He is said to have been interrogated and to have seen a prosecutor. He was reportedly taken to “Gorotdel”, but is said to have been taken back to the Sabai region police station every day for further questioning. C. Information concerning remand centres 1. General information 40. An October 1999 presidential decree transferred the remand institutions from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice. The Minister of Justice rightly pointed out that this transfer should reduce the risk of torture since suspects are, according to the Minister, rapidly taken out of the hands of their investigators. Nevertheless, the Deputy Minister of Justice pointed out that while the personnel of these detention centres are formally under his Ministry, they often continued to apply the rules of the previous one. Mentalities were said still to be changing, but the Deputy Minister indicated his commitment to meet this challenge, as well as to improve the conditions of detention. 41. On 12 May, the Special Rapporteur visited Bailov SIzo where 1,048 persons were detained at the time of his visit. The official capacity of this remand centre was said to be 1,250 persons. No distinction between first-time offenders and recidivists was made. Drug-related and serious offenders were said by the governor of Bailov SIzo to be separated from the others. Women were held in a separate wing, as were the 26 lifers detained at that time. The latter were expected to be transferred to Gobustan Prison as soon as material arrangements to accommodate them were finalized there. Despite the fact that no overcrowding problem was said to exist at that time, the Special Rapporteur visited a cell in which there were 8 beds for 10 persons. The person most recently transferred to the cell had arrived seven days before the visit of the Special Rapporteur while the person who had stayed there the longest had been in the cell for more than one year. The Deputy Minister of Justice acknowledged that it was an unjustifiable mistake on the part of the governor. 42. The quarantine cells, where all newcomers are reported to be held for an initial period, were empty and the governor first indicated that nobody had been brought to the centre on that day. The registry book indicated that no one had been brought in for the last three days. The Special Rapporteur noted that newcomers had been recorded in the register for every other day. A list of prisoners having arrived on that day and on the two previous days was eventually shown to the Special Rapporteur. After discussion with the prison authorities, it was explained to the Special Rapporteur that entries were not recorded in the registry book every day. The Deputy Minister of Justice recognized that this was negligent and that new arrivals should be registered on a regular basis. It was also indicated that new detainees could stay in the quarantine cells for up to one day, but that most of the time their processing, i.e. registration (in particular fingerprinting) and a medical check-up, could be done in a few hours. This explained why the Special Rapporteur did not see anybody in the quarantine cells.