France has signed on September 16th 2005 the optional protocol to the UN convention against torture and other inhuman or degrading cruel sentences or treatments. In late 2006 and early 2007, the Institution of the French Mediator took an active part in discussions to accompany the ratification of this protocol and the establishment of a national preventive mechanism.
The Mediator met fifty players (associations, trade unions, body control and inspection, departmental officials, doctors, elected ...) taking note of their expectations and the sense that everyone wanted to give to this project. In April 2007, continuing its strong participation in public debate, the institution presented at a press conference, its proposals for the creation of a score of places of detention: prison, retention areas, closed educational centres, psychiatric hospitals. Experimentation and generalization, in 2007, of the presence of the Mediator delegates in prisons proceed from the same desire to accompany concretely the improvement of the access to right and respect for the human.
On October 30th 2007, Parliament passed the bill establishing a controller general of places of deprivation of liberty. A decision that the Institution could only welcome since it has largely contributed to the emergence of debate in France.
Since then, the Mediator continues his action on the ground.
In November 2007, he visited several times the psychiatric nursing from the Prefecture of Police in Paris, highlighting how difficult it is to keep people under surveillance, not on the basis of an act committed, but on the basis of a risk of danger, to themselves or others. In this regard, the transition between the management of the individual by the police and the medical profession of nursing is at the heart of the Mediator concerns.
On January 18th 2008, the Institution of the French Mediator co-organized with the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe a conference on “deprivation of freedoms and human right”, to which were invited all the European Ombudsmen as well as national institutions related to human rights.
