12 Mar Life sentence

The European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights in the case Petukhov v. Ukraine (No. 2) (application no. 41216/13, 12/03/2019).

The European Court has already found a violation of Article 3 of the Convention in another application brought by Mr Petukhov (no. 43374/02) concerning inadequate medical care during the period of his detention not covered by the current case, that is before July 2010 when he was transferred to the Kherson prison hospital.

The application no. 41216/13 mainly concerned a prisoner’s complaint that Ukrainian law did not provide for release on parole for life prisoners. Mr Petukhov, the applicant, has been serving a life sentence since 2004.

The Court found a violation of Article 3 because Mr Petukhov had no prospect of release from or possibility of review of his life sentence. In particular, presidential clemency, the only procedure for mitigating life sentences in Ukraine, was not clearly formulated, nor did it have adequate procedural guarantees against abuse.

Given the systemic nature of the problem, the Court held under Article 46 (implementation) that Ukraine should reform its system of reviewing whole-life sentences by examining in every case whether continued detention was justified and by enabling whole-life prisoners to foresee what they had to do to be considered for release and under what conditions.

The applicant further alleged under Article 3 that the conditions of his detention in the two Kherson prison facilities had been poor and that inadequate medical care in prison had resulted in an irreversible deterioration in his health. Bearing in mind a number of other cases against Ukraine in which the Court had already noted inadequate medical care for tuberculosis, it held that there had been a violation of Article 3 on account of the authorities’ failure to safeguard Mr Petukhov’s health in detention since his transfer to the prison hospital in July 2010.

References from the official website of the European Court of Human Rights