A/HRC/21/35 Torture who provided advice to the authorities. The Government has since pledged to draft a new law to establish a preventive mechanism. 51. Secondly, OHCHR continued to provide support to the interministerial committee established as a precursor to the creation of a national preventive mechanism. In particular, training was provided to members of the committee and its secretariat on how to conduct preventive visits to places of detention. Their mandate was presented and explained to all provincial heads of police and gendarmerie and all prison chiefs at a national conference at the Ministry of the Interior, in December 2011. The committee subsequently started a programme of visits to several prisons. In addition, OHCHR continued to provide support to the Office of the Prosecutor General to conduct visits to places of detention, accompanying the Prosecutor General on one such visit. 52. Thirdly, the Rule of Law Programme started a series of training sessions in the provinces, in cooperation with chief prosecutors, for police and gendarmerie officers on the prevention, investigation and prosecution of acts of torture and ill-treatment. Lastly, since the Code of Criminal Procedure guarantees access to a lawyer only after 24 hours of police custody, and considering that most instances of police brutality occur within that time, OHCHR developed, in cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, an arrest rights card to inform persons arrested of their rights. The card will be distributed at police stations across the country. 53. Fair trial standards require that appeals be decided within a reasonable time. Many prisoners wait for excessive periods for their appeals to be heard. The Code of Criminal Procedure allows for prisoners to be detained even after the end of their sentence, when the appeal lodged by the prosecutor is still pending. OHCHR is currently working closely with the Court of Appeal to reduce the backlog of pending cases. As a first step, data on pending appeal cases collected in 2011 by the prisons are being cross-checked against the information available at the Court of Appeal and courts of first instance. In parallel, OHCHR and the President of the Court of Appeal will jointly convene a workshop in August 2012 to discuss increased cooperation between the courts and prison authorities to improve and expedite the appeal process. The new Court of Appeal building, built after a proposal of OHCHR (and with financial support from the Government of Australia and OHCHR), was completed during the reporting period. 54. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia continued to make significant progress towards the completion of its first two cases. The Court’s chamber of final appeal issued its judgement in the case of Kaing Guek Eav alias ‘Duch’ (case 001) in March 2012, sentencing Duch to life imprisonment. The Trial Chamber also made progress in case 002, in which three former leaders of the Communist Party of Kampuchea were being tried. 55. Despite general praise for the final verdict in case 001, OHCHR is concerned to note that a majority of judges reversed an important human rights aspect of the Trial Chamber’s decision, namely, to grant Duch a five-year deduction in his sentence as compensation for the prolonged period he had spent in pretrial detention. The Trial Chamber’s determinations on this issue could have served as an important example for the national sector of a Cambodian court safeguarding the right to a trial without undue delay, regardless of the crimes charged or the person convicted. 56. Furthermore, allegations of political interference and judicial misconduct with regard to two additional cases continued to mar the Court’s institutional reputation and to jeopardize the credibility of its ongoing investigations. The deterioration in the institutional reputation of the Extraordinary Chambers was further exacerbated by a lack of support from Member States in continuing to fund the Court, putting significant pressure on the institution’s national and international staff to fulfil the Court’s mandate using limited 14