The Government of Montenegro has finally published the translation of the report of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) on the Committee’s 2008 visit to Montenegro, on the web page: http://www.gov.me/biblioteka?query=cpt&sortDirection=desc, as we have been informed in the letter from the Administrative Court received last week.

CPT Report is written in English language and provides the assessment of European experts on, among other things, “appalling” living conditions of the residents of the institute Komanski most; high risk of police abuse; unpunished cases of abuse of detainees and poor conditions in Spuz and Bijelo Polje prisons. The Report was published in March 2010 on the web site of the Committee (CPT) http://www.cpt.coe.int/documents/mne/2010-03-inf-eng.pdf, four months after Human Rights Action demanded from the Government to allow its publication.

Immediately after the report was published in English, we requested the Ministry of Justice to publish its translation, which exists since the middle of 2009, when the CPT report was submitted to the Government. As there was no response, we were forced to seek the translation by filing a request for free access to information, a repeated request and finally a claim to the Administrative Court.

HRA finds it inappropriate in a democratic society that a Government should delay providing information to the public on the compliance with human rights in government run institutions. We also emphasize that to date it remains unknown that any minister, public servant or employee bore any political or legal liability for the situation described by the CPT report, which only encourages impunity and further violations of human rights.