E/CN.4/1995/34/Add.1 page 8 the official, the policeman threatened, over the protests of the official, to shoot the suspect unless he confessed to the crime. The fact that the policeman felt free to commit this act in the presence of a witness indicates that there was no fear of punishment. 22. When a suspect is taken into custody he or she is immediately brought to the police station where he or she is placed in a holding room pending verification of his or her identification papers. Although an individual is not to be held in the holding room for longer than three hours, the Special Rapporteur received numerous reports that it is not unusual for individuals to be so held for longer than three hours. An attorney explained how one client had been held for 24 hours in the holding room. The Office of the Regional Procurator had subsequently acknowledged the excessive detention and indicated that (unspecified) measures would be taken against the (unspecified) person responsible. Similarly, the Special Rapporteur received direct testimony from a detainee in the IVS at Petrovka 38 in Moscow that he had been held for 24 hours in the holding room while the police verified his identification papers. 23. Although the time at which a police officer is dispatched to the scene of a crime and the time the officer returns to the police station is recorded in a journal, the time a detainee is placed in the holding room is not recorded in the journal for logging custody. The pertinent information about an individual is not recorded in this journal until his or her identification has been verified; the time at which this takes place is reflected in the journal. This method of recording information into the custody journal is susceptible to abuse, despite the safeguards developed to prevent such abuse. 24. In a major improvement over Soviet practice, Russian law now requires that detained persons must be informed by the police of their right to have an attorney. However, it is not uncommon for an individual taken into custody not to be informed of this right or to be denied the right after it is requested. In the Moscow remand centre Butyrskaya, a member of the Special Rapporteur’s delegation spoke to one detainee who had been in custody for nine days, yet he had not been granted the right to contact a lawyer. Indeed, the detainee indicated that the investigator working on his case explicitly told him that it would be foolish for him to hire a lawyer since his guilt had been established. III. THE PRELIMINARY DETENTION PHASE 25. As noted above, the formal arrest of a suspect technically does not occur until an investigator makes a decision to institute criminal proceedings against the suspect. "Arrest" is a measure of restraint of accused persons and "detention" is a measure of restraint of suspects prior to accusation. Pursuant to article 122 of the RSFSR of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the investigator has 24 hours after an individual is taken into custody to notify the Office of the Procurator, which has a further 48 hours to determine whether to initiate a criminal case; accordingly, there is a maximum 72-hour period of confinement prior to accusation. However, article 90 of the Code of Criminal Procedure provides in exceptional cases for confinement of suspects for up to 10 days without presentation to them of the accusation.