November 22, 2024
By Louise Reyntjens and Ruben Vilain On August 27, in the B.D. v. Belgium judgment, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) once again found the Belgian government at fault for its treatment of interned persons in prisons. Under Belgian law, ‘internment’ is classified as a safety measure aimed at protecting society from ‘dangerous’ individuals, […]
December 01, 2023
by Dr Steve Foster Disenfranchisement of convicted prisoners in Europe remains varied despite the Grand Chamber’s pivotal decision in Hirst v. United Kingdom No. 2 that any interference with a prisoner’s right to vote had to be necessary and proportionate. Thus, since Hirst the Court has upheld a number of State restrictions on prisoner voting […]
May 12, 2021
By Dr. Aristi Volou (Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Fundamental Rights, Hertie School and Associate Editor of Oxford Reports on UN Human Rights Law) Introduction On 11 March 2021, the First Section of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter the ‘Court’) delivered a highly anticipated judgment which concerned issues related to the Covid-19 […]
March 12, 2021
By Andrea Broderick (Assistant Professor of International and European Law, Maastricht University, The Netherlands) and Delia Ferri (Professor of Law, Maynooth University, Ireland) Delia Ferri and Andrea Broderick have collaborated on several recent publications, including the first textbook on International and European Disability Law and Policy: Texts, Cases and Materials (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and […]
May 18, 2020
By Maïté De Rue Because they are often very populated places with poor living conditions, prisons present a high risk of contamination in a period of pandemic such as COVID-19. A number of countries have taken measures to decrease pressure on penitentiary institutions by releasing prisoners or decreasing the number of new arrivals. This approach […]
March 26, 2019
Lewis Graham is a PhD Student at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Life sentences – that is, indefinite detention without any opportunity for release – is a thorny issue, and the involvement of the European Court of Human Rights in this field, particularly in cases concerning the United Kingdom, have recently courted great controversy. After […]
November 07, 2017
By Beril Onder, PhD researcher at Ghent University and University of Strasbourg On 3 October 2017 the Fourth Section of the Court delivered the judgment in Alexandru Enache v. Romania. The case concerned a discrimination complaint under Article 14 read in conjunction with Article 8 of the Convention, regarding a special measure granting women stay […]
November 25, 2015
By Rebecca Deruiter, PhD Researcher at the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), Ghent University[1] In recent years, the case of Farid Bamouhammed has been covered frequently by Belgian media, characterizing him as notoriously unmanageable and resulting in the widespread used nickname of Farid ‘Le Fou’. After numerous judicial proceedings, by both Farid […]
July 02, 2015
Guest post by Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou (University of Surrey) and Filippo Fontanelli (University of Edinburgh) On 30 June 2015, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in the case Khoroshenko v. Russia. With this decision, the Court set the boundaries of State regulation in the area of penitentiary policy, namely […]
September 12, 2014
The Trabelsi case is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, because of the blatant disregard by Belgium of the interim measure issued by the European Court of Human Rights. Secondly, because of the application of the reasoning from Vinter v. UK – in which the Court found that life without parole is incompatible with Article 3 […]
June 13, 2014
In Velyo Velev v. Bulgaria, the Court found a violation of the right to education (Article 2 Protocol 1) in a case concerning the refusal to allow a prisoner to enrol in a secondary school operating inside the prison. While the judgment should be hailed for explicitly affirming that remand prisoners also enjoy the right […]
February 10, 2014
If you look up the word ‘degrading’ in the dictionary, chances are that you find a picture there of a person who cannot help shitting him- or herself. In the case of Lindström and Mässeli v. Finland, the Strasbourg Court however did not consider that state authorities necessarily inflict ‘degrading treatment’ when they are responsible […]
October 11, 2013
This guest post was written by Yousra Benfquih* In the case of Epistatu v. Romania of 24 September 2013 before the European Court of Human Rights, the applicant, Mr. Cristian Epistatu, a Romanian national and final-year high-school student born in 1990, was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment by a judgment of 12 […]
May 30, 2013
When systematically reading the Court’s case-law, it becomes clear that poor conditions of detention remain one of the most dramatic human rights problems in contemporary Europe. The last decade, the Court has done a good job in interpreting Article 3 ECHR as to include a right for prisoners to be held in decent detention conditions. […]