Research projects

SIRECOVI is System for the Documentation and Communication of Institutional Violence which seeks for the protection of victims. The System base its works on international treaties and standards and on the State's commitments in the field of human rights, constituting a tool that seeks to guarantee respect and protection of the human rights of persons deprived of their liberty. The System is put into operation upon receipt of a communication of a possible case of ill-treatment or torture in places of deprivation of liberty (for example in prisons, police stations, juvenile centres or detention, or foreigners detention centres), or caused in the context of public demonstration of use of public space.

SIRECOVI has several ways to know possible cases: directly through interviews with possible victims and their families, during visits to prisons, through lawyers, human rights organizations, or from any individual through its web form. Upon receipt of the complaint, the SIRECOVI team will follow a series of steps, including the validation of the case by the team of professionals and its subsequent registration in a specialized database. Then, and whenever deemed relevant, the situation will be communicated to public institutions and social, national and international human rights organizations, alerting them to the situation in order to initiate procedures for the protection of the victim.

For more information, we invite you to visit our website, where you can access, among other things, the complaint form for the communication of possible cases, our case map, where you can view, in the form of cartography, the different situations documented, or our publications and statements.

From the beginning of the health emergency arising from the Covid-19, from the Observatory of the Penal System and Human Rights of the University of Barcelona (OSPDH) we began to analyze the implications that the political decisions taken to control the spread of viruses they were having in the exercise of the agencies of the penal system. Mainly, we direct our work in two aspects: 1) the implications of the health emergency in prisons and 2) the police action in the surveillance of the measures of the State of Alarm.

After the first two months of work we decided to shape a structured research project we call “Monitoring Deprivation of Liberty and Police Activity During the Covid-19 Emergency”. The main objective of the project is to be able to constantly monitor the impact that the pandemic and the measures adopted to combat it are having in prisons and the implications that police activity has in its task of monitoring compliance with restrictive measures of movements, activities or social distancing.

You can consult here  the reports developed within the framework of the project.