A/HRC/28/48 25. Anti-Government elements, including the Taliban, also continued to deny humanitarian access to children in the areas under their control. UNAMA/OHCHR was able to verify 66 such incidents out of 74 reported. Verified incidents included abduction, intimidation, killing and injury of humanitarian staff, mostly of deminers, denying access to vaccinators and causing damage to facilities run by humanitarian organizations. 26. Despite progress made by the Government, information gathered by the task force highlights that many challenges remain in the full implementation of the Government’s action plan for the prevention of underage recruitment, including limited age-determination procedures and reports of under-18s recruited, both by the Afghan National Police and the local police. As such, in the most recent report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict (A/68/878–S/2014/339) the national police and the local police remained listed for underage recruitment. 27. The Government, with support from UNAMA/OHCHR and the United Nations Children’s Fund, developed a road map towards compliance of the action plan for the prevention of underage recruitment. This was endorsed by the Interministerial Steering Committee on Children and Armed Conflict and progress has been made in its implementation. As part of the road map, UNAMA/OHCHR provided technical support for drafting of a presidential decree to criminalize underage recruitment. It was adopted by the lower house on 1 November and was pending approval by the upper house of Parliament at the time of finalizing the present report. Age assessment practices are being strengthened through the development of national guidelines. Another milestone, which can contribute to reducing underage recruitment, was endorsement by the Minister of Interior of the national birth registration strategy. III. Protection from arbitrary detention and respect for fair trial rights 28. Over the past year, Afghanistan’s prison population decreased from 32,157 adult and juvenile detainees and prisoners in 2013 to 27,859 (as at 22 October 2014). These figures comprise 12,221 detainees and 15,638 prisoners housed in Central Prisons Directorate facilities and the juvenile corrections and rehabilitation centres across Afghanistan. 29. The prison population included 7,555 persons detained or imprisoned in connection with the armed conflict, but excluded persons held by the national police or the National Directorate of Security in pretrial custody. In the majority of cases, conflict-related detainees are held arbitrarily for extended time periods, in violation of legally prescribed time limits and due process guarantees under Afghan law, in particular the 2014 Criminal Procedure Code. Most of these detainees do not have access to defence counsel, have not been informed of the charges against them and have not been brought before a tribunal while in the custody of the national police and National Directorate of Security. 30. Treatment of conflict-related detainees while in the custody of the national police and National Directorate of Security remains a major human rights concern. In 2014, as in previous years, torture usually took the form of coercive interrogation techniques in which Afghan officials inflicted severe pain and suffering on detainees during interrogations aimed mainly at obtaining a confession or information. A newly identified trend is to outsource torture to small and remote detention facilities to which detention-monitoring organizations have no access owing to the prevailing insecurity in Afghanistan. UNAMA/OHCHR is due to issue its third major report on human rights concerns regarding the treatment of conflict related detainees in early 2015. 31. One key recommendation of the UNAMA/OHCHR 2013 detention report, still unimplemented almost two years on, is the creation of an independent national preventive 9