Information Note on the Court’s case-law 207
May 2017
Matiošaitis and Others v. Lithuania - 22662/13, 51059/13, 58823/13 et al.
Judgment 23.5.2017 [Section II]
Article 3
Degrading punishment
Inhuman punishment
Whole-life sentences offering no genuine prospects of release: violation
Facts – The six applicants whose applications were declared admissible were all serving life sentences. In their applications to the European Court, they complained under Article 3 of the Convention that their sentences were not de jure or de facto reducible.
Law – Article 3: The question for the Court was whether the penalties imposed on the applicants should be classified as irreducible, or whether there was a prospect of release.
a) Parole, commutation for terminal illness, amnesty and reclassification of sentence – None of these measures afforded a genuine prospect of release. Under Lithuanian law only prisoners serving fixed-term sentences, not life prisoners, were eligible for release. For its part, and as the Court had consistently held, commutation of life imprisonment because of terminal illness could not be considered a “prospect of release”. Likewise, amnesty under Lithuanian law could not be regarded as a measure giving life prisoners a prospect of mitigation of their sentence or release. All previous amnesties declared by the Seimas had not applied to prisoners convicted of the most serious crimes and three of the amnesties had explicitly excluded life prisoners from their scope. Moreover, as an act of general rather than individual application amnesties did not appear to take into account the rehabilitation aspect of each individual prisoner.* Lastly, although Article 3 of the new Criminal Code enabled life sentences to be reclassified and commuted to a fixed term, this was a one-off possibility and all the applicants who had been eligible had already applied under that provision without success.
b) Presidential pardon – Life prisoners became eligible to request a pardon within a period that was substantially less than the maximum of 25 years the Court had indicated as being acceptable in Vinter and Others and Murray, the procedure was transparent and accessible and involved a set of criteria that allowed the President, on the basis of advice from the Pardon Commission, to assess whether a life prisoner’s continued imprisonment was justified on legitimate penological grounds.
However, the presidential pardon could not be regarded as making life sentences reducible de facto. Firstly, neither the Pardon Commission nor the President was bound to give reasons for refusing a request for a pardon. Secondly, the President’s pardon decrees were not subject to judicial review and could not be challenged by the prisoners directly. Thirdly, the work of the Pardon Commission was not transparent and its recommendations were not legally binding on the President. In sum, the presidential power of pardon in Lithuania was a modern-day equivalent of the royal prerogative of mercy, based on the principle of humanity rather than a mechanism, with adequate procedural safeguards, for review of the prisoners’ situation so that the adjustment of their life sentences could be obtained. In addition, prison conditions for life prisoners were not conducive to rehabilitation: although a number of social rehabilitation programmes had been set up in Lukiškės Prison, where life prisoners had to serve the first ten years of their sentence, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) had reported that prisoners were held for 22½ hours a day in their cells and were kept in small group isolation with little possibility to associate with prisoners from other cells.
***
In order to guarantee proper consideration of the changes and the progress towards rehabilitation made by a life prisoner the review of a whole life sentence should entail either the executive giving reasons or judicial review, so that even the appearance of arbitrariness is avoided. Presidential pardons in Lithuania de facto did not allow life prisoners to know what they had do to be considered for release and under what conditions and there was no judicial review available. Accordingly, the applicants’ life sentences could not be regarded as reducible for the purposes of Article 3 of the Convention.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41: finding of a violation constituted sufficient just satisfaction in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
(See also Kafkaris v. Cyprus [GC], 21906/04, 12 February 2008, Information Note 105; Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom [GC], 66069/09 et al., 9 July 2013, Information Note 165; Harakchiev and Tolumov v. Bulgaria, 15018/11 and 61199/12, 8 July 2014, Information Note 176; Murray v. the Netherlands [GC], 10511/10, 25 April 2016, Information Note 195; Hutchinson v. the United Kingdom [GC], 57592/08, 17 January 2017, Information Note 203; and, more generally, the Factsheet on Life imprisonment)
* As the Court had indicated in earlier cases, a review of a whole-life sentence should permit the authorities to assess any changes in the life prisoner and any progress towards rehabilitation.
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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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