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Human Rights and Prisons

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Embedding Human Rights in Prison

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Abstract

Since the late 1970s much progress has been made in the field of prisoners’ rights. As a result of the legalisation of prisoners’ human rights in Europe, we are at a stage now that European states and their prison administrations can no longer in principle ignore issues of human rights compliance. In practice, effective protection of prisoners’ human rights is undermined by the limitations of the legalisation of human rights and the dominance of public discourses of risk and penal populist rhetoric. These have established imprisonment as popular punishment in Europe and have resulted in chronic overcrowding and increases in life sentences and preventive detention.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The EU accession to the ECHR is a legal requirement under the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in 2009. For these purposes, an accession treaty between the CoE and the EU was negotiated in 2013, which the Court of Justice in its Opinion 2/13 found, however, incompatible with EU Law.

  2. 2.

    See, e.g. Eurojust, Europol, and FRA. Eurojust is a judicial co-ordination unit that is tasked with the co-ordination of investigations into and prosecutions of transnational crime between relevant authorities in different member states. It comprises prosecutors, judges and police officers drawn from member states. Europol is the EU’s law enforcement agency. It focuses on combatting transnational organised crime and terrorism and provides expert assistance to national law enforcement agencies. FRA is the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and is tasked to provide expert advice to EU institutions and nation states on human rights protection.

  3. 3.

    It is worth noting that the 2004 European Recommendation on the Rights of Prisoners in the European Union proposed the adoption of a Prisons Charter by ECHR and non-ECHR member states. The proposal was rejected by the CoE Committee of Ministers on grounds of avoiding duplication of existing standard-setting instruments and monitoring arrangement (CoE Parliamentary Assembly 2006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Health & Social Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Anastasia Karamalidou

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  1. Anastasia Karamalidou
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Karamalidou, A. (2017). Human Rights and Prisons. In: Embedding Human Rights in Prison. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58502-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58502-8_1

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