OPINIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE FRENCH CGLPL 2/ The inventory of items confiscated from people placed in custody or held for sobering-up is signed upon arrival by a police officer but not by the person being held. The reasons invoked – that the arrested person is usually intoxicated or seeking to “avoid making things worse” – are not deemed acceptable because of their overly general character that excludes an individualised case-by-case assessment. We recommend that, unless it is absolutely impossible (in which case the police officer will then take note of it), people should sign an inventory of items confiscated from them upon their arrival in custody or for sobering up, so that, once released, they will be able to verify the accuracy of what is returned to them. 3/ Conditions for meetings with lawyers and examination by doctors cannot be significantly improved by the simple fact that the building will soon be “refurbished.” Respect for detainees’ rights to defence and health necessitates a comprehensive review of the design and layout of the current facility. 4/ Medical examinations are carried out by GPs in the framework of an agreement signed with “SOS-médecins” (an on-call mobile medical service); the different doctors involved do not perform the examinations consistently. The elements of the medical examination and the professional practices utilised must be made consistent. In particular, training must be implemented for GPs who intervene in the custody cells and sobering-up cells, building on the recommendations of the consensus conference on that subject held on 2nd and 3rd December 2004. 5/ Financial responsibility for medicine, in the case of people who are unable to pay or who do not have national health coverage, is handled by the operational management service of the Besancon police station on a specific budget line. It would be useful to apply this solution more broadly, in view of difficulties observed in some places related to the abandonment of financial responsibility for medicine by the courts since the entry into force of the Organic Law Governing Finance laws.16 16 30 Loi d’orientation relative aux lois de finances, French organic law n°2001-692 of 1st August 2001 on financial laws: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidT exte=JORFTEXT000000394028 (in French).