Tali v. Estonia concerned a detainee\u2019s complaint about having been ill-treated by prison officers when he refused to comply with their orders. In particular, pepper spray was used against him and he was strapped to a restraint bed.<\/p>\n
The Court held that there had been a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the Convention. As regards in particular the legitimacy of the use of pepper spray against the applicant, the Court referred to the concerns expressed by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) concerning the use of such agents in law enforcement.<\/p>\n
Mili\u0107 and Nikezi\u0107 v. Montenegro The applicants complained that they had been ill-treated by prison guards \u2013 they submitted that the latter had beaten them with rubber batons during a search of their cell \u2013 and that the ensuing investigation into their complaints had been ineffective. According to the Montenegrin Government, the guards had had to use force against the applicants to overcome their resistance on entering their cell.<\/p>\n
The Court held that there had been two violations of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the Convention, on account of the ill-treatment to which both applicants had been subjected during a search of their cell as well as the ineffectiveness of the ensuing investigation into their complaints of ill-treatment.<\/p>\n
The Court found in particular that, even though it had been established in the compensation and disciplinary proceedings concerning the applicants\u2019 complaint of ill-treatment that the guards had used excessive force, the damages awarded to the applicants had not been sufficient.<\/p>\n
Cirino and Renne v. Italy concerned the complaint by two detainees that in December 2004 they were ill-treated by prison officers of the Asti Correctional Facility. The applicants maintained in particular that the acts of violence and ill-treatment which they had suffered in the correctional facility amounted to torture and that the penalty for those responsible for the acts of ill-treatment had been inadequate. They emphasised that by failing to incorporate the offence of torture into national law, the State had failed to take the necessary steps to prevent the ill-treatment which they had suffered.<\/p>\n
The Court held that there had been violations of Article 3 (prohibition of torture and of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the Convention, both as regards the treatment sustained by the applicants (substantive aspect) and as regards the response by the domestic authorities (procedural aspect). It found in particular that the ill-treatment\u00a0inflicted on the applicants \u2013 which had been deliberate and carried out in a premeditated and organised manner while they were in the custody of prison officers \u2013 had amounted to torture.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, in the Court\u2019s view, the domestic courts had made a genuine effort to establish the facts and to identify the individuals responsible for the treatment inflicted on the applicants. However, those courts had concluded that, under Italian law in force at the time, there was no legal provision allowing them to classify the treatment in question as torture. They had had to turn to other provisions of the Criminal Code, which were subject to statutory limitation periods. As a result of this lacuna in the legal system, the domestic courts had been ill-equipped to ensure that treatment contrary to Article 3 perpetrated by State officials did not go unpunished.<\/p>\n\n
\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Family Life Prisoners continue to enjoy fundamental human rights and freedoms consistent with the deprivation of liberty involved in imprisonment. This includes the right to marry and right to maintain family life. The restrictions must be proportionate in terms of the competing interests of the state and the individual. In Boyle and Rice v. United […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[344],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10204"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23585,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10204\/revisions\/23585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}