A/HRC/11/5 61. Hygiene and health-care conditions are generally very precarious, despite ICRC assistance and refurbishment work carried out at some prisons, while the number of doctors and nurses means that access to care, where it exists, is limited to basic symptomatic treatment of the most common illnesses. The independent expert recommends that prisons be supplied with sufficient stocks of medicines, drugs and provisions to guarantee detainees’ right of access to medical care and food. 62. Renovation work has, however, begun with a view to increasing available space at the Hinche, Carrefour and Cap-Haïtien prisons. In Port-au-Prince, plans have been drawn up to convert a former psychiatric hospital into a prison. The construction of a major new penitentiary establishment close to the capital is being contemplated provided that land-related problems can be resolved. 63. The independent expert recommends that a programme be initiated for the building of new prisons, in particular in Les Gonaïves, to relieve the strain on the penitentiary system and to address the issues of prison overcrowding and the use of police stations as places of detention. 64. One of the causes of prison overcrowding is linked to, inter alia, pretrial detention and, while there were almost four times more individuals incarcerated in Haitian prisons in 2008 than in 1995, 8 the proportion of those held in pretrial detention remained at about 80 per cent of the prison population over the same period. 65. The mandate of the Consultative Commission on Prolonged Pretrial Detention (CCDPP) has been extended to April 2008 and its area of responsibility increased to include Gonaïves. The Consultative Commission was instrumental in the release of 892 detainees but its functioning and proposals have been widely criticized for having contributed, according to the United Nations Police and specialist NGOs, to the release of several tens of dangerous criminals. 66. The independent expert recommends that the Consultative Commission be given a new, nationwide mandate and entrusted with the task of examining, in accordance with clear and verifiable criteria, cases involving non-serious crimes or arbitrary detention, and that a prisoner’s discharge may only be authorized by a working group composed of judges, in order to prevent the release of dangerous criminals. B. Violence against women 67. Since the ratification by Haiti of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, the country has seen considerable advances in women’s rights and in awareness of the actual issues involved, although instances of violence against women and girls have continued to be reported by the major intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. The independent expert has had the opportunity to meet the two succeeding Ministers on the Status of Women and Women’s Rights and learnt with great interest of the action taken by the National Forum on Violence against __________________ 8 16 According to the statistics supplied, the prison population was approximately 2,000 in 1995, 4,100 in 2001 and 7,869 in 2008.