FIRST SECTION
DECISION
Application no. 28438/07
Roman Vladimirovich ANTIPENKOV
against Russia
The European Court of Human Rights (First Section), sitting on 22 September 2015 as a Committee composed of:
Elisabeth Steiner, President,
Paulo Pinto de Albuquerque,
Erik Møse, judges,
and André Wampach, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to the above application lodged on 16 May 2007,
Having regard to the observations submitted by the respondent Government and the observations in reply submitted by the applicant,
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
THE FACTS
1. The applicant, Mr Roman Vladimirovich Antipenkov, is a Russian national, who was born in 1980 and lives in Zelenyy, the Bryansk Region.
2. The Russian Government (“the Government”) were represented by Mr G. Matyushkin, the Representative of the Russian Federation at the European Court of Human Rights.
3. The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.
4. In connection with the criminal proceedings against him the applicant was held in the IVS Dyatkovo in the Bryansk Region during the following periods:
(a) from 14 December 2002 to 3 June 2003;
(b) from 22 to 26 December 2003;
(c) from 5 to 9 April 2004;
(d) from 19 to 30 April 2004;
(e) from 17 to 21 May 2004;
(f) from 28 October to 9 November 2004;
(g) from 26 March to 12 April 2005.
5. On 4 October 2004 the applicant brought a civil claim for compensation in respect of inadequate conditions of his detention between 14 December 2002 and 21 May 2004 in the IVS Dyatkovo (periods (a) to (e) above). He sought 20,000 Russian roubles (RUB) as compensation in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
6. On 7 December 2004 the Dyatkovo Town Court of the Bryansk Region partly granted the applicant’s claim and established that as a result of poor conditions of his detention in the IVS Dyatkovo he had contracted a cardio-vascular disease. It also awarded the applicant RUB 2,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage. The applicant appealed against the judgment. On 28 April 2005 the Bryansk Regional Court quashed the Town Court’s judgment and remitted the case for a fresh examination considering that the Town Court had not established a causal link between the conditions of the applicant’s detention and his health condition.
7. On 22 September 2005 the Town Court dismissed the applicant’s claim considering that he had failed to show that the poor conditions of his detention had affected his health. On an unspecified date the Regional Court quashed the judgment upon the applicant’s appeal claim and remitted the case to the Town Court for a fresh examination.
8. On 2 February 2006 the Town Court partly granted the applicant’s claim and awarded him RUB 2,000 in damages. The Regional Court again quashed the judgment and remitted the matter to the lower court.
9. On 14 November 2006 the Town Court granted the applicant’s claim in part, awarding him RUB 4,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage. On 22 February 2007 the Regional Court held that the Town Court had disregarded the fact that the applicant was a repeat offender and reduced the award to RUB 1,000.
COMPLAINTS
10. The applicant complained under Articles 3, 6 and 13 of the Convention about inhuman and degrading conditions of his detention in the IVS Dyatkovo and about insufficient awards by the domestic courts.
THE LAW
11. The Government submitted that the applicant had at his disposal an effective domestic remedy which he had made use of. They further submitted that the conditions of his detention had not been in breach of Article 3 of the Convention.
12. The applicant maintained his complaints.
13. Given that the period of the applicant’s detention in the police ward IVS had ended more than six months before his application was lodged with the Court, the Court must first determine whether the applicant complied with the six-month requirement imposed by Article 35 of the Convention. By contrast to an objection as to the non-exhaustion of domestic remedies, which must be raised by the respondent Government, the Court cannot set aside the application of the six-month rule solely because a government have not made a preliminary objection to that effect (see Ananyev and Others v. Russia, nos. 42525/07 and 60800/08, §§ 71-72, 10 January 2012).
14. The applicant’s most recent stay in the police custody had taken place more than six months before he lodged the application with the Court. However, the most recent decision in the civil proceedings was given within the six-month period.
15. The Court reiterates that, in the present state of Russian law, a civil action for compensation for inadequate conditions of detention cannot be considered an effective remedy because the court award is conditional on the establishment of fault on the part of the authorities and because the level of compensation is unreasonably low as compared with the awards made by the Court in similar cases (see Ananyev and Others, cited above, §§ 113‑118). In Norkin, the Court found that by 2007 its case-law on the absence of an effective remedy for complaints concerning poor conditions of detention had been sufficiently established and concluded that the applicant should have been aware of the ineffectiveness of the judicial avenue he had made use of before he lodged his application (see Norkin v. Russia (dec.), no. 21056/11, §§ 15-20, 5 February 2013). Yet in Shishkov, the Court accepted that in 2005 and 2006 the applicant could have reasonably believed that a civil action for damages offered a prospect of success (see Shishkov v. Russia, no. 26746/05, §§ 84-86, 20 February 2014). It must therefore be established whether the applicant in the instant case, unaware of circumstances which rendered the civil remedy ineffective, still complied with the six-month rule by availing himself of that remedy.
16. The extent to which the applicant was aware of the Court’s case-law is not in itself decisive, for the Court ought to take into account his experience of availing himself of the remedy in question and specific features of the proceedings (see, for example, Artyomov v. Russia, no. 14146/02, §§ 114-116, 27 May 2010).
17. The applicant endured the allegedly inhuman conditions of detention on several occasions, the first and by far the longest of his stays had ended on 3 June 2003 (see paragraph 4 (a) above). It was not until 4 October 2004, that is more than sixteenth months later, that he lodged his compensation claim. The Court sees no reason which could have forced the applicant to choose to wait for so long before applying to a domestic court, save for his own belief that such an action would be meaningless (compare Norkin, cited above, §§ 22-23, and Artyomov, cited above, § 116).
18. Even assuming that the applicant genuinely believed that a civil claim for damages was capable of granting him relief, the manner in which his rather straightforward compensation claim was dealt with by the domestic courts should have alerted him that the remedy might be ineffective. Unlike in Shishkov, reaching the final judgment in the present case took more than thirty months, the applicant’s case having been remitted to the court of first instance three times. The applicant was expected to prove a causal link between poor conditions of his detention and actual damage to his health. The court awards, if any, were well below the modest relief sought by the applicant, while new arguments against his claim kept emerging with each round of proceedings. The applicant had thus been confronted with the same defects of the compensation proceedings which prompted the Court to pronounce this remedy ineffective for conditions‑of‑detention complaints (see paragraph 15 above). Even without the benefit of legal advice, he should have become aware of the futility of such course of action at least after the second round of proceedings when his compensation claim was fully rejected by the Town Court (see paragraph 7 above).
19. The foregoing considerations are sufficient to enable the Court to conclude that the applicant should have been aware of the ineffectiveness of the judicial avenue he had made use of, long before he lodged his application with the Court.
20. It follows that the applicant’s complaint about allegedly inadequate conditions of detention is inadmissible for non-compliance with the six‑month rule set out in Article 35 § 1 of the Convention, and must be rejected pursuant to Article 35 § 4.
21. The Court also examined the applicant’s complaints under Articles 6 and 13 of the Convention. Having regard to all the material in its possession, and in so far as these complaints fall within the Court’s competence, it finds that they do not disclose any appearance of a violation of the rights and freedoms set out in the Convention or its Protocols. It follows that this part of the application must be rejected as being manifestly ill-founded, pursuant to Article 35 §§ 3 and 4 of the Convention.
For these reasons, the Court, unanimously,
Declares the application inadmissible.
Done in English and notified in writing on 15 October 2015.
André WampachElisabeth Steiner
Deputy RegistrarPresident
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy