CPT: 12TH GENERAL REPORT 11 Publications 16. The trend in favour of lifting the veil of confidentiality and publishing CPT visit reports continues. No fewer than 16 visit reports were published by the Committee during 2001, at the request of the governments concerned, together with a similar number of government responses. Another 7 visit reports have already been published to date in 2002, and more will be published in the coming months. It is particularly noteworthy that the Ukrainian authorities have recently requested the publication of the reports on the three visits carried out so far to their country, in 1998, 1999 and 2000; these reports will be made available shortly. At the time of writing, 91 of the 129 visit reports so far drawn up have been placed in the public domain. A State-by State table showing the situation as regards the publication of CPT visit reports is set out in Appendix 2. 17. On 6 February 2002, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe “encourage(d) all Parties to the Convention to authorise publication, at the earliest opportunity, of all CPT visit reports and of their responses”. The CPT welcomes this clear message and hopes that it will be heeded. Publication of visit reports can only increase the impact of the CPT’s work; it allows other relevant organisations to contribute to the process of taking forward the implementation of CPT recommendations and also enables the Committee to participate directly in public debate on the issues involved. The Committee of Ministers also invited Parties to the Convention to consider the possibility of publishing written observations forwarded to them by CPT visiting delegations after a visit, together with any comments they wish to make in response. It is now common practice for CPT delegations to provide States with written preliminary observations shortly after visits. Timely publication of such observations will mean that the delegation’s principal findings are widely known at an early stage rather than months after the event. Consequently, the CPT hopes that more States will be persuaded to follow the example of Turkey in this regard, which has already on four occasions authorised the publication of preliminary observations made by CPT delegations. 18. On 17 May 2001, the CPT launched a torture prevention database. It contains the full text of all published CPT reports, amounting to some 6000 pages of text. Searching has been made as easy and powerful as possible; users can search for any words, but can also select from pre-established lists of keywords, detention places, categories of detained persons and States. The database http://hudoc.cpt.coe.int/ is accessible at 19. 2001 also saw the publication of “Combating torture in Europe – The work and standards of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture”. The authors of this book, Professors Rod Morgan and Malcolm Evans from Bristol University (UK), provide what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive independent analysis to date of the standards developed by the CPT over the last twelve years. English and French versions of this book have been published by Council of Europe Publishing, and an Italian version by Sapere 2000 Edizioni Multimediali. German and Russian versions are currently in preparation.