A/HRC/28/29 on crime. However, both article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and customary international law provide that Governments should deprive individuals of their liberty only when there is a pressing societal need, and in a manner proportionate to that need. Mr. Andenas also pointed out that many States had witnessed an increase in the use of imprisonment as a sentence, with more minimum sentences and less discretion for judges, as well as an increased use of indeterminate detention. In addition, hastily drafted legislation on detention, in the case of extradition or immigration control, often did not take into account basic international law obligations. For this reason, international supervision was increasingly important in order to protect the human rights of persons deprived of their liberty, in particular in the area of over-incarceration, which was raising an ever greater number of problems in this context. 14. When considering the adequacy of the international framework on judicial oversight, the Chairperson of the Human Rights Committee, Nigel Rodley, stressed that the issue of judicial oversight of detention was central to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and to the Committee’s understanding of it. It arose primarily in two contexts under article 9: firstly, article 9, paragraph 3 affirms that everyone has the right to be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power if being held in connection with criminal charges; and secondly, article 9, paragraph 4 affirms that everyone has the right to challenge the lawfulness of his or her detention under all circumstances, irrespective of the reason for the detention. This right applied in all circumstances, including, in principle, in times of emergency. The Committee considered that the prohibition of arbitrary arrest and detention was non-derogable under international law. The Committee Chairperson welcomed the panel’s attention to the fact that, too often, persons deprived of their liberty do not have the opportunity to challenge their detention legally, and called upon parties to the Covenant to ensure that detention could be challenged before a court by persons subjected to that detention or someone acting on their behalf. 15. According to the Senior Legal Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, Martin Schöntiech, the excessive and arbitrary use of pretrial detention constituted a massive violation of human rights. He estimated that, in a typical year, 15 million unique individuals passed through the world’s pretrial detention systems. Considering the sheer number of families and households affected by detention, tens of millions of people around the world came into contact with a pretrial detention regime every year. Mr. Schöntiech identified five significant consequences of pretrial detention: prison overcrowding and the resulting poor conditions; torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; poor public health and the spread of infectious diseases among detainees; corruption; and socioeconomic issues. Pretrial detention had socioeconomic consequences for detainees and their families. The family of a detainee often had to pay bail or provide for the costs of a lawyer. In some countries, they had to provide food, clothing and medicine. Mr. Schöntiech stressed that these consequences were interrelated and compounded one another. For example, corruption leads to arbitrary arrests, which causes prison overcrowding. Overcrowding undermines public health, which in turn increases the impact of pretrial detention on detainees, their families and communities. Mr. Schöntiech concluded by stressing that alternatives to pretrial detention were often provided for in the law; the problem, however, lay in their implementation. 16. When asked about his views on the oversight and monitoring mechanisms of treatment of detainees and their conditions of living, the Public Defender at the Tribunal de Casación Penal of Buenos Aires and member of the Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Council, Mario Coriolano, called for a stop to overcrowding in jails across the world, because the situation was leading to an increase in social violence. He stressed that many different monitoring bodies existed - local, international, judicial, internal and external – and that they should complement each other, because there was a great number 5