CAT/C/75 page 42 198. These provisions were adopted to stamp out the constant abuse of supposed offenders by police officers during criminal investigations but have not had the desired effect, in particular because the Public Prosecutor’s Office is still empowered to accept confessions. 199. In practice, the rules prohibiting the police from securing confessions that might be used in evidence have not been interpreted as banning the police from interrogating detainees. The judicial police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office work closely together to detain suspects and secure the requisite evidence (generally in the form of confessions) to sustain the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s committal of the suspects for trial. It is not uncommon for a detainee to be shuttled repeatedly between one service and the other. The police, at whose disposal the detainee remains for some time, interrogate him and bully him into confessing or disclosing information on the offence under investigation. They will sometimes force him to sign confessions that have already been drawn up, warning him that when addressing the public prosecutor he must confine himself to confirming their contents. 200. During their visit to the State party the Committee members met a number of detainees in prison who told them that, when they refused to confirm in the presence of the public prosecutor the contents of confessions they had been forced into by the police, they had been taken back to the detention cells so that the police could continue to interrogate them. Once they had signed an incriminating statement prepared by the police, they were brought once again before the public prosecutor, where they had no option other than to confirm it.44 201. Public Prosecutor’s Office officials do not generally bother to ascertain whether a confession has been voluntarily made. In exceptional cases, on being presented by a suspect with allegations of torture against the police bringing him in, or observing that the suspect bears visible injuries, an official has, while taking the suspect’s statement, ordered an initial investigation into the causes of those injuries or the allegation of torture, without necessarily feeling constrained not to use the contested confession as grounds for committing the complainant for trial.45 202. Despite the binding rules in the Constitution and laws on the inadmissibility as evidence of statements obtained under duress, in practice it is extraordinarily difficult for an accused to have a confession that has been forced out of him excluded from the body of evidence. In practice, when an accused retracts the confession on which the public prosecutor has based the decision to commit him for trial, alleging that he was forced to make it under torture or duress, the courts have no independent means of ascertaining whether the confession was made voluntarily. At most they can ask the Public Prosecutor’s Office to launch an appropriate initial investigation, but neither the fact that an independent investigation has been begun nor any evidence that may be gathered as it proceeds have any effect on the criminal proceedings against the accused whose confession was obtained under duress. 203. In a discussion on this topic that the Committee members had with the justices of the Tamaulipas High Court, the justices said that retractions needed to be backed up by other evidence, otherwise the initial statement would be regarded as valid. The burden of proof did not necessarily have to fall upon the individual: the court could call for tests to be carried out, though it did not normally do so.