A/HRC/14/44 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Over the following days police officers were ordered to organize security patrols to prevent looting and lynching by the people. 40. Several hundred police officers and blue helmets were involved in protecting humanitarian convoys and were gradually made available for security work with the arrival of contingents of police officers and military personnel assigned to MINUSTAH. Joint patrols were organized with UNPOL, not without difficulty, to secure the boundaries of the camps and the high-risk zones and arrest convicts who had escaped from the national prison, but the independent expert fears that no-go areas which the police are reluctant to enter are being re-established. 41. Allegations of the extrajudicial execution of looters by members of the National Police have circulated; some of them have been documented and complaints have been lodged about them. However, the independent expert welcomes the fact that clear instructions were given by the Secretary of State to the services of law and order and the Director General of the National Police concerning the procedures to be followed in emergencies. But by the time of drafting the present report the independent expert had received several credible pieces of evidence and case files showing that this problem is far from under control. 2. The justice system 42. At least 10 members of the Judiciary, including the most senior judge and two other judges of the court of first instance in Port-au-Prince, the Government Commissioner in the court of first instance in Hinche, and a Deputy Government Commissioner to the court of first instance in Port-au-Prince, four ushers and a clerk of the court of first instance in Portau-Prince, lost their lives in the earthquake. 43. The Palace of Justice, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Public Order and the Palace of the Legislature were destroyed. The Court of Cassation finally found a home in the Judiciary Training College, and, having authorized the court of first instance to sit in the premises of the prosecution service, the Minister of Justice is trying to find a new building to house the Court of Appeal, thus demonstrating his determination to get the country’s judicial institutions back to work. Notwithstanding the damage suffered by the judicial institutions, it is important to send out some prompt and powerful signals to show that the justice system is continuing to operate, albeit in difficult conditions. 44. In fact, apart from the Port-au-Prince jurisdiction, the departmental courts can and must continue to sit, even though nobody underestimates the impact of the crisis on the courts in other departments resulting from the difficulty of communication between the capital and the other jurisdictions and the massive influx of displaced persons in other towns. 3. The situation in the prisons 45. In his previous reports the independent expert drew attention to the difficult situation of Haiti’s prisons, characterized principally by overcrowding and excessively long periods of pretrial detention,13 these two factors being closely interrelated. During his visits to other departments he was able to establish that this situation was not limited to Port-au-Prince but was to be found, with rare exceptions, not only in the prisons but also in some National Police stations. 46. The situation has undergone a complete reversal since the earthquake. Several prisons were damaged and, according to the Haitian authorities, some 5,000 inmates took 13 In his latest report the expert indicated that the proportion of prison inmates being held in pretrial detention was close to 80 per cent and that the floor space allocated to each detainee in the civilian prison in Port-au-Prince was less than half a square metre (A/HRC/11/5, para. 59). GE.10-13204 (EXT) 11