European Court of Human Rights

Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 178

November 2014

Vintman v. Ukraine - 28403/05

Judgment 23.10.2014 [Section V] See: [2014] ECHR 1136

Article 8

Article 8-1

Respect for family life

Refusal to transfer prisoner to a prison nearer home so that he could receive visits from his elderly mother: violation

Facts - In his application to the European Court the applicant complained that he had been forced to serve his prison sentence far from his home, with the result that his elderly mother, who was in poor health, had been unable to visit him for over ten years. At the time of the Court’s judgment he was serving his sentence in a prison some 700 kilometres from home with a journey time that took between 12 and 16 hours. The prison authorities had repeatedly refused his requests for a transfer citing problems of space and, more recently, his behaviour.

Law - Article 8: The failure to transfer the applicant to a prison closer to home had effectively denied him any personal contact with his mother and thus amounted to interference with his right to respect for his family life under Article 8. The Court was prepared to accept that the interference was in accordance with the law and pursued the legitimate aims of preventing prison overcrowding and maintaining discipline. It was, however, disproportionate. Although the authorities had relied on the absence of available places, they had failed to give any details and there was no evidence that they had in fact considered placing him in any of the many regions closer to his home address. In point of fact, the region where the applicant was transferred in December 2009 was one of the furthest from his home. As regards the applicant’s behaviour, no differentiation was made between his requests for mitigation of his prison regime and those for his transfer to a prison of the same security level closer to home. In any event, the question of behaviour was raised by the authorities for the first time in April 2010, whereas the applicant had been asking for a transfer since December 2001. Lastly, the authorities did not dispute that the applicant’s elderly and frail mother was physically unable to travel to visit him in the regions where he was imprisoned. The fact of the matter was that the applicant’s personal situation and his interest in maintaining his family ties had never been assessed, and no relevant and sufficient reasons for the interference in question were ever adduced.

Conclusion: violation (unanimously).

The Court also found unanimously violations of Article 8 in conjunction with Article 13 in respect of the lack of an effective remedy for the applicant’s inability to obtain a transfer to a prison closer to home and of Article 8 taken alone on account of the monitoring of his correspondence.

Article 41: EUR 12,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage.

(See also Khodorkovskiy and Lebedev v. Russia, 11082/06 and 13772/05, 25 July 2013, Information Note 165)

 

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