Treatment, rights and remedies of prisoners and persons on remand : a comparative legalistic appraisal between the European Union and the Council of Europe

Abstract

Torture and other inhumane and degrading treatment have been the primary devices used by ‘authorities’ to extract information from prisoners in order to prejudice criminal proceedings in favour of the state. Because of this, a fundamental rule has emerged, in that the basic human rights and freedoms of persons should always be respected even though these persons happen to be prisoners. A prisoner should be treated with dignity and respect, even though he has been deprived of his personal liberty due to investigative due process. The Council of Europe and subsequently the European Union felt the need to protect prisoners’ rights by legislating on this issue. As a result, prisoners have been granted rights and remedies in case of violations which are set out in legal instruments and which can be implemented through the European Court of Human Rights or (the new emerging trend) through the Court of Justice of the European Union. This thesis explores and examines this EU/CE divide, the reasoning and justification behind the parallel legal and judicial orbits, the possible supremacy of one system over the other, the scenarios pre-considered as alarming and threatening and the safeguards put in place as a counter. The question that is dealt with in the main corpus of this thesis is whether the EU has created real value added when it has installed a parallel legal and judicial system in addition to that of the Council of Europe. This issue, although not completely resolved, is however clearly elucidated towards the final chapters of this thesis. A definite understanding emerging from this thesis is the fact that the lines between the EU and the CE legal and judicial systems have been severely blurred mainly because of the former’s juvenility in relation to the CE as also because of their legal proximity.