the framework of the workshop Sistema Prisional - Execução de Penas – Direitos Humanos [Prisons – Penalty enforcement - Human Rights], organized by the Human Rights Commission of the Portuguese Bar Association, in Lisbon. This participation managed to show to a qualified audience the NPM performance and capabilities, not only in its inspective action (visits), but also towards the exercise of its power to make recommendations and follow-up monitoring. 2.3.2. Institutional diffusion The NPM aims to verify that persons who are deprived of their liberty are being treated decently. Thus, it is important that all those who are restricted in their freedom – whether this restriction is founded on a criminal sentence, a tutelary measure or as an effect of danger due to mental disorder – being aware of the existence of an organization that checks on the spot their living conditions, therefore asserting the respect for their fundamental rights. Moreover: also those who work in prisons, educational centres or in other places in which liberty can be restricted must also be aware of the rights of persons who held there and of the NPM’s activity. Following the work carried out in 2014, the NPM established, in January 2015, a separate set of pages on the institutional website of the Ombudsman. It is therefore a page that provides information on the functions, structure and activity of the NPM, in particular on the visits made and the appropriate statistical analysis. Given that the creation of this body is new and innovative in the national legal framework (its genesis goes back only to 2013), it is particularly important to provide the community and citizens with information on the NPM, ensuring, this way, the spreading of the awareness about its mission. Informative posters and leaflets, those for exhibition and these for distribution at places of deprivation of liberty, were made and delivered. Its content emphasized the NPM’s functions and contacts. On June 26th, 2015, the NPM celebrated the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, through a message posted on the institutional website(28) and an interview to the public television network (RTP). With these initiatives the NPM joined to the SPT with a public evocation of that date. Finally, it should be noted that at the end of 2015 the English version of the NPM content at the institutional webpage has been made publicly available, therefore widening the possibility for that information to be known to a wider universe of persons and organizations. (28)  This message is available here: http://www.provedor-jus.pt/?idc=35&idi=15648. 86 |