The European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR) has found that Belgium’s internment policy, under which an offender with a mental illness was held in the psychiatric wing of a prison for 9 years without adequate treatment, violates the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention). The ECtHR invoked the so-called “pilot procedure” to order that Belgium take measures to ensure that the internment system conforms to the principles of the Convention within two years.
By way of background, the internment policy was created by Belgian social defence laws, purportedly to protect society against “dangerous” offenders with mental illnesses. The applicant, WD, was interned in 2007 aged 19 after being convicted of indecent assault of a minor. Because of his autism-spectrum disorder, the internment measure was pronounced and WD was interned in the psychiatric wing of a prison. The ECtHR found that he did not receive any appropriate treatment, nor did he have any prospect of readmission to society.
The ECtHR held that Belgium had breached a number of Convention articles. It was held that, in particular, Belgium was in violation of Article 3 of the Convention, which prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment, as WD received insufficient medical support while interned. The ECtHR did acknowledge that Belgium had taken some steps to find external support for the treatment of WD, but that structural and systematic problems in the internment policy hindered these efforts.
The ECtHR also found Belgium in breach of article 5.1 (guarantee of liberty and security) because of the absence of psychiatric help and therapy, and the unsuitability of the ward to WD’s condition. The ECtHR found that the link required by Article 5.1 between the purpose of detention of an individual and the conditions of that detention had been broken.
Belgium was found to be in breach of Article 5.4, guaranteeing right of access to the courts, and the speedy determination of the lawfulness of an applicant’s detention, and the Article 12 right to effective and practical recourse and remedy through the courts. The Court criticised the “structural dysfunctionality” of the current system. No domestic legal proceedings could have led to the improvement of the conditions in which WD was held, nor could they prevent the alleged violations continuing. The only remedy available to WD through the Belgian courts would have been financial compensation.
The ECtHR noted that it had condemned Belgium’s internment policy in 23 previous judgments, and identified a failure in the domestic courts system as exacerbating the extent of the problems arising from the internment policy. As the applicant’s problems cannot be divorced from this structural dysfunctionality and as the situation was capable of affecting many people, with 50 complaints pending before the Court, the pilot procedure was invoked. The ECtHR gave Belgium 2 years to improve the legal and factual situation, followed by a re-evaluation.
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Click here for the judgment in WD v Belgium (in French only).