Committee for the Prevention of Torture

The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment or shortly Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) is the anti-torture committee of the Council of Europe. It has been described as a striking inroad into the usually well-preserved domain of sovereign states.

The CPT was founded on the basis of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1987), which came into force in February 1989. It allows the CPT to visit all "places of detention" of the member states of the Council of Europe. Places of detention, as defined by the convention, are all places in which people are held without their consent.In the first place, this covers police cells, jails, prisons and closed psychiatric institutions, but also immigration detention centres, old peoples homes and the like. The visits are carried out by small teams of CPT members, who usually call in additional experts. After each visit, a report about the findings and recommendations is drawn up and sent to the respective government. The findings deal not so much with individual cases of torture but with the identification of situations at risk that may lead to torture. The CPT reports are confidential and are be published only if the government so requests. But political pressure on the governments is strong to make the report public. Only in the rare case in which governments refuse to publish and the CPT has clear evidence of a practice of torture, the CPT may make a unilateral "public statement".

All 47 member states of the Council of Europe have ratified the Convention for the Prevention of Torture. Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, which entered into force on 1 March 2002, provides for non-member States of the Council of Europe to accede to the Convention, but none have been invited to do so to date.

After 20 years of experience, this European model was adapted and generalized by the United Nations through the OPCAT optional protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture (2006).

Members of the CPT are independent and impartial experts from a variety of backgrounds, including law, medicine and the justice system. They are elected for a four-year term by the Committee of Ministers, the Council of Europe's decision-making body, and can be re-elected twice. One member is elected in respect of each member state.