11 Jul Low Domestic awards for wrongful imprisonment violated the European Convention on Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 5 § 5 (right to compensation for wrongful imprisonment) of the European Convention on Human Rights, in the case of Vasilevskiy and Bogdanov v. Russia (applications no. 52241/14 and no. 74222/14, 10/07/2018).

The case concerned the applicants’ complaint about the negligible amount of compensation they had been awarded for wrongful imprisonment. Mr Vasilevskiy had been wrongfully deprived of his liberty for one and a half years, while Mr Bogdanov had been wrongly imprisoned for four months.

The Court noted that the Convention did not set specific levels for compensation and that it was for domestic courts to assess the level of suffering, distress, anxiety or other harmful effects of unlawful imprisonment. Nevertheless, awarding a negligible or extremely low level of damages would render the right to compensation theoretical and illusory rather than practical and effective, as required by the Convention.

The Court found in particular that the domestic awards were the equivalent of 7 euros and 2.70 euros per day of wrongful imprisonment, which was so low as to impair the essence of their right to compensation under the European Convention.

In addition, the Court observed that Mr Bogdanov’s compensation had been reduced five-fold by the appeal court, without a plausible explanation for such a drastic cut. The domestic court had not mentioned that his wrongful imprisonment had been caused by police incitement and the use of inadmissible evidence in criminal proceedings. The domestic courts should instead have considered it their duty to signal their disapproval of the police’s actions with sufficient compensation. Overall, the amounts awarded had been so low that they had undermined the essence of their right to compensation and there had been a violation of the Convention.

The Court held that Russia was to pay each applicant 5,000 euros (EUR) in respect of non-pecuniary damage, it also held that the award in respect of non-pecuniary damage did not extinguish the legal obligation on the domestic authorities to remedy the violation of the Convention that it had found.

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