Information Note on the Court’s case-law 85
April 2006
Léger v. France - 19324/02
Judgment 11.4.2006 [Section II]
Article 5
Article 5-1
Deprivation of liberty
Arbitrariness of the applicant’s continued detention during an exceptionally lengthy period: no violation
Article 3
Degrading treatment
Inhuman treatment
Exceptionally lengthy period of detention: no violation
[This case was referred to the Grand Chamber on 13 September 2006]
Facts: In July 1964 the applicant was arrested and prosecuted following the abduction and murder of an 11-year-old boy. He made a confession while in police custody but retracted it several months later. He has protested his innocence ever since. In a judgment of 7 May 1966 the Assize Court found him guilty as charged and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He made unsuccessful applications in 1971 and 1974 for a retrial. On 5 July 1979 he became eligible for parole after a “probationary period” of 15 years. Between 1985 and 2000 he made numerous applications to be released on licence, but all were refused, in some cases for his own safety despite evidence supporting his release. In addition, he made several unsuccessful applications for a presidential pardon. In January 2001 the applicant made a further application to be released, submitting that friends had offered to put him up and give him work on his release. The Sentence Enforcement Board gave a unanimous opinion in favour of the applicant’s release on licence and his probation and rehabilitation officer was likewise strongly in favour. However, on 6 July 2001 the Regional Parole Court refused the applicant’s application. It observed that he still denied having committed the offence of which he had been convicted and that experts had been unable to conclude that he no longer posed a potential danger and that there was no risk of his reoffending; since those risks could be averted only through psychotherapeutic counselling and support, which he was reluctant to accept, it was not clear that he was making “serious efforts to ensure his social rehabilitation” even though there was a coherent plan for his resettlement. That decision was upheld on appeal on 23 November 2001 by the National Parole Court on the grounds that the applicant’s planned rehabilitation had been put in doubt by the intervening bankruptcy of the person who had offered to put him up and give him work and that he did not intend to receive any psychological counselling in spite of his paranoid tendencies. In January 2005 the applicant again requested his release on licence. The prison authorities were in favour but the public prosecutor was opposed, arguing in particular that there was a risk that he might reoffend. Holding that the applicant’s conduct no longer stood in the way of his release and that the risk of his reoffending had become virtually non-existent, the court responsible for the execution of sentences granted him release on licence. He was conditionally released on 3 October 2005, having spent more than 41 years in prison.
Law
Article 5 § 1 (a) – The applicant had indisputably been convicted by a competent court in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law and his detention had complied with national law. His complaint in fact concerned the irrelevance of the reasons given for keeping him in prison, particularly in relation to the refusal of his application for release on licence in 2001 by the courts specialising in the execution of sentences, and the absence of any connection between those reasons and the punitive purpose of his initial conviction. As regards his argument that the national authorities had applied an additional criterion not provided for by domestic law, namely the lack of reform on his part, that was a matter relating to the national authorities’ interpretation of the applicable domestic provision and could not in itself amount to a breach of the rules of national law. As to whether the applicant’s detention had been consistent with the purpose of the restrictions provided for in Article 5, it was important to note at the outset that there was no uniform parole system in Europe and that the French model, notwithstanding its discretionary nature, did not call for particular condemnation in relation to others. However, in order to assess whether a person’s detention had been arbitrary, it had to be ascertained whether there was a sufficient causal connection with the conviction. In the present case the applicant’s life sentence had not prevented him from regaining his liberty since he had been released on licence with a view to preventing his permanent exclusion from society. Prior to that, in view of the extreme gravity of his offence, his life sentence had not been arbitrary for the purposes of Article 5, seeing that his continued imprisonment had never lost its connection with the initial punitive purpose and that other factors relating to “risk” and “dangerousness” had justified the refusal of his applications for release. Furthermore, the applicant had been released on licence in 2005 because the courts had considered that his conduct no longer stood in the way of his release and that the risk of his reoffending had become virtually non-existent. The grounds given by the French courts for keeping him in prison had therefore not been unwarranted in view of both the initial punitive aim and the persistence of reasons militating against his release. Although the courts had decided to release him only in 2005, after 41 years in prison – an exceptionally lengthy period which raised serious questions regarding the management of prisoners serving life sentences – it did not appear that the reasons they had previously given had been “unreasonable”, including when they had refused to follow the favourable opinions of the prison authorities in 2001. Indeed, in 2004 the experts had still not been able to conclude with any certainty that the applicant posed no danger, in view of his character and personality. Accordingly, the applicant’s detention after 2001 had been justified under Article 5 § 1 (a).
Conclusion: no violation (five votes to two).
Article 3 – The applicant had been released after an exceptionally lengthy period of imprisonment, resulting from a sentence imposed at a time when the system of periods of unconditional imprisonment did not exist. However, from 1979 onwards, after he had spent fifteen years in prison, he had been able to apply for release on licence at regular intervals and had been protected by procedural safeguards. He could not therefore maintain that he had been deprived of all hope of obtaining partial remission of his sentence, which was not irreducible. Accordingly, the applicant’s continued detention, no matter how long it had been, had not constituted inhuman or degrading treatment as such. While a life sentence such as the one in issue in the present case necessarily entailed anxiety and uncertainty linked to prison life and, after release, to the measures of assistance and supervision and the possibility of returning to prison, the applicant’s sentence could not be said to have attained the level of severity required for a violation of Article 3. No other circumstances, in terms of any aggravation of the suffering inherent in imprisonment, warranted the conclusion that the applicant had undergone an exceptional ordeal capable of constituting treatment contrary to that provision.
Conclusion: no violation (five votes to two).
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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