CEDH · CASELAW;CLIN;ENG — 14 juin 2022

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Turkey (No. 2) - 34417/10 Judgment 14.6.2022 [Section II] Article 9 Article 9-1 Manifest religion or belief Unjustified refusal to allocate room in high-security prison to Muslim prisoner for congregational Friday prayers: violation Facts – When the present application was lodged, the applicant was a convicted person who had been in detention for more than eleven years and was serving his sentence in high-security prison. The prison’s administration refused his request to allocate a room so he could offer congregational Friday prayers and his challenges thereto were unsuccessful. Law – Article 9: (a) Applicability – It was common ground that congregational Friday prayers were one of the precepts of Islam and there was no reason to doubt that the applicant’s wish to offer them had been genuine, reasonable and sufficiently connected to his right to manifest his religion. Although not decisive, it was also relevant that the domestic authorities had at no point during the domestic proceedings given any consideration to the question of whether the applicant had (or had not) been required to offer Friday prayers owing to his being deprived of his liberty. Accordingly, the applicant was entitled to lay claim to the protection afforded by Article 9. (b) Merits – The applicant had been able to perform individual acts of worship in his cell and to obtain and possess books or other written material relating to his religious beliefs. Given that he had been sharing his cell with other inmates and there had been no indication that his cell mates had also been willing to offer congregational Friday prayers, the Court could not subscribe to the Government’s argument that the applicant could have practised those prayers in his cell. Furthermore, as his complaint centred on the authorities’ refusal to make the necessary arrangements enabling him to offer congregational Friday prayers with other inmates in a separate place allocated for that purpose, the Court had to determine whether the State in this case had been compliant with its positive obligations under Article 9. It found that it had not, the domestic authorities not having struck a fair balance between the competing rights and interests at stake, that is, the applicant’s freedom of collective worship in the prison and the public order interests (security and order in prison), by adducing relevant and sufficient reasons for their refusal. In particular, the reasons adduced by the prison authorities had been essentially based on three grounds: (i) The institution in which he had been held was a high-security prison: although such prisons were subjected to a stricter set of rules, which might call for a higher degree of restrictions on the exercise of rights under Article 9, that fact alone should not be construed as excluding any real weighing of the competing individual and public interests but should rather be interpreted in the light of the circumstances of each individual case. On this point, the Court attached importance to the fact that it did not appear that the domestic authorities had carried out an individualised risk assessment in respect of the applicant; they had not considered whether he had been classified as a dangerous or high-risk inmate or had otherwise acted violently, attempted to escape from prison or failed to abide by the disciplinary rules relating to prison order. (ii) Collective gatherings posed a risk to prison security: the domestic authorities had not sufficiently assessed whether the gathering of a certain number of inmates for Friday prayers might, in the individual circumstances of the case, had generated a security risk that they should have been treated differently from the collective gatherings of inmates for cultural or rehabilitative purposes, which were permitted by domestic law. (iii) Absence of appropriate premises for Friday prayers in the prison: the domestic authorities had not explored any other modalities, including those which were less restrictive of the applicant’s rights under Article 9. Accordingly, the Court was not convinced by the Government’s argument that realising the applicant’s request could only have been possible by opening the doors of all the cells. Conclusion : violation (unanimously) (See also Abdullah Yalçın v. Turkey , 2723/07, 21 April 2009)   © Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court. Click here for the Case-Law Information Notes