A/HRC/40/59 such as public security, migration, the protection of minorities and social and economic welfare. 45. For example, excessively punitive policies on small-scale, non-violent criminality generally entail an overuse of incarceration that, in turn, leads to prolonged pretrial detention in overcrowded and understaffed places of detention marked by cruel, inhuman or degrading conditions and high levels of violence by staff and between inmates (A/73/207, para. 40). In practice, this trend is very likely to go hand in hand with high levels of corruption among police officers, prison staff and within the judicial system, involving all kinds of extortion in exchange for alleviating cruel, inhuman or degrading prison conditions, protection against abuse, access to legal counsel, timely court hearings and favourable verdicts or sentences. 46. Moreover, political decisions depriving migrants of safe and regular migration pathways and thereby in practice eroding the meaningful implementation of the principle of non-refoulement, including through the criminalization of humanitarian assistance to migrants (A/73/314), push migrants towards irregular pathways controlled by smugglers, traffickers and corrupt officials and expose them to very significant risks of abuse and exploitation, including torture and ill-treatment for ransom, organ removal, forced labour, slavery or servitude, sexual abuse, forced adoption, child soldiering, begging and coerced criminal activities (A/HRC/37/50, paras. 31–35). As the Special Rapporteur concluded in his report to the Human Rights Council, “the primary cause for the massive abuse suffered by migrants in all regions of the world, including torture, rape, enslavement, trafficking and murder, is neither migration itself, nor organized crime, nor the corruption of individual officials, but the growing tendency of States to base their official migration policies and practices on deterrence, criminalization and discrimination rather than protection, human rights and non-discrimination” (A/HRC/37/50, para. 66). 47. In sum, even in the absence of any deliberate aim to do so, high-level political decisions may give rise to policies and practices conducive to corruption and torture or illtreatment. In order to fulfil their mutually reinforcing obligations under the absolute and non-derogable prohibition of torture and ill-treatment, therefore, Governments and political leaders should carefully evaluate the foreseeable implications and consequences of their decisions, as well as the policies and practices likely to arise from them, and ensure that they will not, in the ordinary course of events, create, maintain or contribute to any environment conducive to corruption and torture or ill-treatment (see, too, A/73/207). D. Systemic governance failures conducive to corruption and torture or illtreatment 48. On the level of systemic governance, corruption and torture or ill-treatment are best understood as two concurrent effects of the same original cause, namely a failure of the surrounding governance system to prevent the rise and exercise of unchecked power. Apart from extreme circumstances marked by a near complete suppression or collapse of the rule of law, such as in dictatorial regimes, failed States, armed conflicts or natural disasters, unchecked power tends to result from systemic governance failures that may not necessarily, or not at first sight, be perceived as conducive to corruption and torture or illtreatment. Nevertheless, wherever there is a causal connection between systemic governance failures and corruption, torture and ill-treatment, regardless of the intentionality or purposefulness of that connection, an international legal obligation to take systemic remedial measures can be derived directly from the duty of States to take effective measures for the prevention of torture and ill-treatment and of corruption.14 1. Systemic tolerance for unchecked power 49. One of the most fundamental root causes of corruption and torture or ill-treatment committed, facilitated or tolerated at all levels of State authority is the absence of effective 14 Convention against Torture, Part I and United Nations Convention against Corruption, chap. II. 13