Legal summary
April 2026
Antonov v. Estonia - 48721/22
Judgment 28.4.2026 [Section III]
Article 3
Degrading punishment
Inhuman punishment
Resetting of the starting date of the 25-year minimum term of a life sentence to the date of the new criminal conviction for another offence: violation
Facts – The applicant has been detained since 18 October 1994. He was convicted in May 1995 and May 1996 and sentenced to 15 years in prison on both occasions. He was convicted again in August 1996, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment. While serving that sentence, the applicant was convicted of three more criminal offences in 2004, 2013 and 2021 respectively. In 2013 the domestic courts had set the starting date of his aggregate sentence as the date on which he had been sentenced in 2004. Both in 2004 and 2021 the starting date of his aggregate sentences had been reset to run from the date of his latest respective conviction. In 2021 the first-instance court under Articles 64 § 4 and 65 § 2 of the Criminal Code, added the “unserved part” of the applicant’s previous life sentence to this latest sentence and, as an aggregate punishment, sentenced him to life imprisonment. Consequently, the applicant was deemed to have started to serve the term of this aggregate punishment on the day of his conviction, that is 9 July 2021; the period from 18 October 1994 until 8 July 2021 was held to have been already served.
The applicant’s appeals seeking the setting aside of the first-instance judgment in so far as it concerned setting the starting date of serving his aggregate sentence were unsuccessful.
Law – Article 3:
In the circumstances of the present case, the domestic legal framework for a review of a life sentence could not be equated with a situation of there not being any clear time frame for first sentence review at all. Nor could it be found that the initial 25-year minimum term that a life prisoner had to serve was too long from the outset; that term aligned with the international trend towards establishing a special mechanism guaranteeing a first sentence review no later than 25 years after the imposition of a life sentence. However, under the domestic system for calculating aggregate sentences, although the applicant had been in prison since 1994 and had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996, his conviction for a further crime in 2021 – for which he had received a prison sentence of one year and three months – had set back to 2046 his first chance to have his life sentence reviewed. Thus, the first time that he could apply to have his life sentence reviewed would be 50 years after being sentenced to life imprisonment and 52 years after being detained in prison.
The postponement of the possibility to apply for a review of his sentence had been attributable to his own behaviour. The applicant must have been aware that engaging in criminal behaviour while serving a life sentence could only serve to diminish his chances of early release from prison. However, the domestic law did not only provide that the applicant’s criminal behaviour must be taken into account when deciding on his possible early release, it also mandated the resetting of the 25-year minimum term that the life prisoner had to serve before becoming eligible to be considered for early release.
According to the Supreme Court’s interpretation, the new starting date for the aggregate sentence (the sentence that combined the earlier life sentence and the sentence for the new offence) had to be the date of the latest court judgment by which the applicant had been convicted. That date, consequently, automatically appeared to serve as the starting date for calculating the 25-year minimum term to be served before the prisoner could have his life sentence subjected to review with a view to his early release. That system did not take any account of the time that a prisoner had already spent serving his or her life sentence; nor the nature and severity of the new criminal offence that he or she had committed while serving that sentence. The period by which eligibility for consideration for early release was postponed was fixed at 25 years – regardless of the nature or the duration of the sentence received for the newly-committed offence. The applicant’s latest conviction had resulted in the review of his life sentence being postponed until 2046. In such circumstances the period for which a life prisoner had to wait before he or she could for the first time expect to be considered for early release was significantly longer than the maximum recommended time frame (established on the basis of a consensus in comparative and international law) after which the review of a life sentence should be guaranteed.
The instant case had given the Supreme Court its first opportunity to interpret and apply the relevant domestic law in respect of life prisoners. In fact, it had already in 2015 stated that Article 65 § 2 of the Criminal Code was to be understood to mean that the starting date for serving a sentence could only be the date of the latest court judgment. Accordingly, it was not decisive that lower-instance courts had previously interpreted and applied the relevant provisions inconsistently. In the present case, the manner in which the Supreme Court had interpreted the relevant domestic law could not be considered arbitrary or manifestly unreasonable.
However, the domestic courts appeared to have applied the law in question differently at different times with respect to the applicant himself and his argument – challenging the manner in which the starting date of his sentence had been set in the domestic proceedings – had remained unaddressed. The domestic courts’ practice over the years with respect to the applicant must have therefore rendered the mechanism of setting the starting date of an aggregate sentence (and thereby also the starting date for the 25‑year term to be served in order to be considered for early release) confusing and unforeseeable for him.
As for the Government’s argument that the applicant could at any time lodge an application with the President for clemency, the Court noted that, in view of the lack of any relevant procedural safeguards, the presidential clemency procedure did not constitute a remedy that would correspond to the notion of “prospect of release”, as understood in its case-law.
In the light of the above, the domestic mechanism by which every new criminal conviction restarted the running of the 25-year period that a life prisoner had to serve before becoming eligible to seek a review of his sentence unduly delayed such a review. The rigid, automatic and non-individualised application of that rule, regardless of the degree of severity of the offence in question (or the corresponding punishment imposed) or the time that the person had already served in prison, was problematic. Accordingly, the Court was not convinced that the applicant’s life sentence – which he had been serving since 1996 and in respect of which he would only be able to seek a review in 2046 at the earliest – could be regarded as de facto reducible for the purposes of Article 3. In reaching that conclusion the Court noted that, in the course of the present proceedings, the applicant had not argued that, in his individual case, there were no longer any legitimate penological grounds for his continued detention. The finding of a violation under Article 3 could not therefore be understood as affording him the prospect of imminent release.
Conclusion: violation (five votes to two).
Article 41: finding of a violation sufficient in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
(See Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom [GC], 66069/09 et al., 9 July 2013, Legal Summary; Čačko v. Slovakia, 49905/08, 22 July 2014; Bodein v. France, 40014/10, 13 November 2014, Legal Summary; T.P. and A.T. v. Hungary, 37871/14 and 73986/14, 4 October 2016, Legal Summary; Hutchinson v. the United Kingdom [GC], 57592/08, 17 January 2017, Legal Summary; Medvid v. Ukraine, 7453/23, 10 October 2024, Legal Summary)
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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