Part of the preliminary findings of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), following their recent visit to Montenegro, was published by Vijesti, which obtained the document unofficially.

Most of the CPT’s latest criticisms regarding overcrowding in remand prisons and violations of detainees’ rights, as well as the inadequate accommodation and treatment of patients in the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Dobrota, have been repeated for years. The substandard buildings of remand prisons in no way provide the mandatory conditions for holding people who are presumed innocent, especially given what we have learned from the CPT—that bunk beds with as many as four tiers have been installed, endangering lives. The long-standing ignoring of the transformation of the civilian hospital in Dobrota into a forensic (prison) hospital without adequate conditions has long exceeded every acceptable limit.

We are alarmed by the findings concerning juvenile detention and prison units in Podgorica—that sixteen-year-olds live locked up for 23 hours a day in dirty cells under unacceptable conditions—as well as by the humiliating deprivation faced by poor people and foreign nationals in remand prisons, where they do not even receive basic hygiene supplies.

The conditions in which people deprived of their liberty are held reveal a state’s conscience and what it truly thinks about human rights away from the public eye. The situation encountered by the CPT in state institutions—the prisons in Podgorica and Bijelo Polje, as well as the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Dobrota—is a mirror of the betrayed expectations placed in the new authorities that came to power after August 2020 and presented themselves as reformist.

Unfortunately, what has been published from the CPT’s preliminary findings is nothing new; the same warnings were issued by this committee in 2017 and 2022.

Five full years have passed during which respect for the rights of people deprived of their liberty in closed institutions has not been improved. Instead, it has worsened, as the CPT did not hesitate to state.

We recall that the Deputy Prime Minister, Aleksa Bečić, during a high-level meeting with the President of the CPT, Alan Mitchell, in February 2024, stated that “the competent institutions are actively working on the implementation of the CPT’s recommendations.” However, by November 2025 these recommendations have clearly not been sufficiently implemented, and the CPT therefore assessed the situation in remand prisons as inhuman and degrading.

This November, Montenegro is set to assume the presidency of the Council of Europe, which makes its years-long failure to comply with the recommendations of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture all the more dishonorable.

It should be understood that without the implementation of CPT recommendations, Montenegro will not be admitted to the EU, as this is the final benchmark for closing negotiating Chapter 23.

It is tragic that, due to the Government’s inaction, we have been brought to a situation in which the EU must require from Montenegro, as a condition for accession, the basic respect for the rights and dignity of our citizens who are endangered by illness and by miserable conditions in Dobrota, in detention, and in prison.

Given the importance of the CPT’s findings for the national interest of EU accession, Prime Minister Milojko Spajić should publish the complete preliminary findings of the CPT and announce which urgent measures his Government has already undertaken, at the ministerial level, since receiving the CPT’s preliminary observations, as well as what further steps it will take and within what timeframes to fulfill the committee’s recommendations—recommendations that have been repeated for more than ten years. The Government should also grant automatic authorization for the publication of the full CPT report as soon as it is finalized.

It is also regrettable that the Government missed the opportunity to publish the CPT’s preliminary findings itself and, without being prompted, to announce the measures it is taking to urgently improve the situation. Human Rights Action had already appealed for this to be done at the beginning of December.

Nevertheless, the publication of the leaked findings in Vijesti gives hope that there are conscientious officials within state institutions who are willing to expose themselves to risk in order to sound the alarm and seek help for people and children languishing in inhuman and degrading conditions in Montenegro’s state institutions.