Professor Eilion?ir Flynn:

I will add one thing on OPCAT. I appreciate this is probably not the approach that is planned to be taken but again, that could be a crucial role for giving a really important part of the decision-making and that monitoring process to people with lived experience of these systems. That is not necessarily foreseen but international best practice shows how that has been done quite successfully in other jurisdictions, including monitoring these kinds of places of detention like forensic settings but also, let us say, those that would be monitored by HIQA such as residential settings for disabled people, which could also come within the remit of OPCAT. Again, the involvement of disabled people themselves in the monitoring process could be really valuable in terms of getting an insight into what the applicable human rights standards should be and whether they are, in fact, being met in these settings. That could be really essential.

We saw recently, for example, a problem in implementing OPCAT in forensic settings in Australia a few months ago. We want to make sure we are not going to set ourselves up for some of the same mistakes other jurisdictions have made. We need to ensure all of the legislation is in place to make sure there will be full access to all the settings that should be monitored by OPCAT by the national preventative mechanism.