CEDH · PRESS;CHAMBERJUDGMENTS;ENG — 4 novembre 2008

.s800EAC49 { font-size:12pt } .sFE10DC93 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt; text-align:center } .s29100277 { font-family:Arial; font-weight:bold } .s40F41F73 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt; text-align:right } .s32563E28 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt } .sBB9EE52A { font-family:Arial } .s7ED160F0 { text-decoration:none } .s653E6C45 { font-family:Arial; font-size:6.67pt; vertical-align:super; color:#0069d6 } .s4DDA3AA3 { font-family:Arial; font-weight:bold; font-style:italic } .s6B505E72 { margin:0pt; padding-left:0pt } .sD711EC90 { margin-left:31.52pt; padding-left:7.48pt; font-family:serif } .sCB9E0544 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt; text-align:left } .sADADF4A7 { font-family:Arial; text-decoration:underline } .s3DC36BA9 { font-family:Arial; text-decoration:underline; color:#0069d6 } .sC7EAD8B { font-family:Arial; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:underline } .sA36B60A1 { font-family:Arial; font-style:italic } .sF6A12959 { width:33%; height:1px; text-align:left } .s2EB42ED2 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt; font-size:10pt } EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS   774 4.11.2008   Press release issued by the Registrar   Two ill-treatment Chamber judgments concerning Romania   The European Court of Human Rights has today notified in writing two Chamber judgments [1] – available only in French – in the cases of Lupaşcu v. Romania (application no. 14526/03) and Niţă v. Romania (no. 10778/02).   The Court held unanimously, in both cases, that there had been:   a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) on account of the ill-treatment inflicted on the applicants by police officers; and, a violation of Article 3 of the Convention on account of the Romanian authorities’ failure to conduct an effective and adequate investigation into the applicants’ allegations of ill-treatment.   Under Article 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention, the Court awarded each of the applicants 7,000   euros   (EUR) in respect of non-pecuniary damage and EUR   450 jointly to Messrs Niţa for costs and expenses.   1.     Principal facts   The applicants are three Romanian nationals: Ion Lupascu, who was born in 1956 and is currently held in Brǎila Prison (Romania); Vasile Mircea Niţă and Ionel Viorel Niţă, twin brothers who were born in 1971 and live in Roşiori-de-Vede (Romania).   In both cases, the applicants alleged, in particular, that they had been ill-treated by the police.   Lupa ş cu   In September 1997 Mr Lupaşcu had an argument with a saleswoman while buying products in a market. She accused him of punching her in the face and stealing produce, and made a complaint against him. In March 1998 the saleswoman died from complications related to the chronic diseases from which she suffered; according to an expert report, those complications had arisen following the blows received in September 1997.   On 11 November 1997, at about 6.45 a.m., three teams of police officers and gendarmes went to the applicant’s home on the basis of a search warrant issued by the Brǎila prosecutor’s office.   According to the applicant, the police officers immobilised him by striking him numerous times with truncheons, then took him, handcuffed, to a police station where he was placed in custody. The police officers responsible for the investigation allegedly then ill-treated him continuously in order to obtain a confession.   A medical certificate drawn up the following day noted that he had bruising and several abrasions on the lower jaw, thorax and legs, caused by blows inflicted using hard objects or by knocks against hard objects.   In December 1997 the applicant lodged a complaint with the Ploesti military prosecutor’s office, alleging wrongful investigation by the three police officers who had arrested him and questioned him in police custody.   On 15 October 2001 a military prosecutor issued an order finding that there was no case to answer in respect of the three police officers and endorsed their version of events, which was that the injuries found on the applicant’s body had resulted from the resistance put up by him when the police officers were attempting to immobilise him during the arrest.   In February 2000 Mr Lupaşcu was sentenced to 19 years’ imprisonment for theft with violence which resulted in the victim’s death.   Niţă   In January 1995 the applicants lodged a criminal complaint before the Bucharest military prosecutor’s office, alleging wrongful investigation by police officers from the Roşiori-de-Vede station. They alleged that, having been invited to the police station to give statements in the context of a criminal investigation into a theft with violence, they had been detained on several occasions, namely on 10, 17 and 28 December 1994, and on 4 February 1995, by policemen C.M. and R.G., who had subjected them to ill-treatment. According to the applicants, the officers had handcuffed them to the foot of a table and had then struck them, in order to force them to write what the police officers dictated.   A medical certificate drawn up on 16 February 1995 after an examination conducted by a stomatologist noted that the applicants had several broken teeth.   Questioned by the prosecutor’s office, R.G. confirmed that he had handcuffed the applicants to the foot of the table, and justified this by the fact that they had been verbally aggressive towards him and that he had been afraid that this would develop into physical aggression. On the other hand, he denied that he had struck them. Police officer C.M. stated that he had not been responsible for any investigation into the applicants.   The applicants’ mother, who was also invited for questioning by the prosecutor’s office, stated that she had accompanied her sons on each occasion that they were summoned to the police station, and that on 17 December 1994, having heard screams from one of her sons while waiting in the corridor, she had opened the door and seen her sons handcuffed, beaten and covered in blood. She said that she had seen two persons in the room, one of whom was R.G..   On 8 March 1999 a military prosecutor issued an order finding that there was no case to answer against police officer R.G. on the ground that he had died in November 1998. He also issued a decision that there was no case to answer in respect of police officer C.M., on the ground that he had not taken part in the investigation concerning the applicants. The prosecutor’s office decided that the medical certificate of 16 February 1995 could not be taken into consideration, since it had not been issued by an entity authorised by the law to prepare forensic reports, and noted that the injuries recorded in it could have been sustained in other circumstances than those alleged by the applicants.   The applicants appealed unsuccessfully against that decision.   2.     Procedure and composition of the Court   The applications Lupaşcu v. Romania and Niţă v. Romania were lodged with the European Court of Human Rights on 18 February 1999 and 21 January 2002 respectively.   Judgments were given by a Chamber of seven judges, composed as follows:   Josep Casadevall (Andorran), President , Elisabet Fura-Sandström (Swedish), Corneliu Bîrsan (Romanian), Boštjan M. Zupančič (Slovenian), Alvina Gyulumyan (Armenian), Egbert Myjer (Dutch), Luis López Guerra (Spanish), judges , and also Santiago Quesada , Section Registrar .   3.     Summary of the judgment [2]   Complaints   Relying on Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment and lack of an effective investigation), the applicants alleged that they had been subjected to ill-treatment by the police officers and that the investigations conducted into their complaints had been inadequate.   Decision of the Court   Article 3   As to the ill-treatment   In the case of Lupa ş cu , the Court noted, firstly, that it was not disputed between the parties that the applicant had sustained injuries during his arrest. In addition, the conclusions in the medical certificate appeared to be compatible with a struggle during the arrest, in a scenario where there was resistance on the part of the applicant and the police officers were obliged to control the suspect, who, as the Government maintained, objected to his immobilisation.   The Court noted that on the date when the police officers went to the applicant’s home they had no arrest warrant justifying the need to take the applicant, against his will, to the police station. The Court further noted that there seemed to be nothing to justify a forced entry, at such an early hour, by three armed police teams and gendarmes.   Even supposing that the version of events put forward by the police officers and endorsed by the prosecutor’s decision was correct, and that the applicant had thus injured himself while the police officers attempted to immobilise him for the purpose of taking him to the police station, the Court considered that the use of force by the police was unnecessary, as the State agents had exceeded the authorisation they had received to search the applicant’s home.   Accordingly, the Court considered that it had not been shown that the injuries sustained by Mr Lupaşcu during his arrest could correspond to a use of force by police officers that had been rendered strictly necessary by the applicant’s conduct, in violation of Article 3.   In the case of Niţă , the Court noted that on the date when the applicants were summoned to the police station, they had not been formally accused of any offence: they had willingly gone to the police station following a written summons.   It was not disputed that during the questioning of the applicants police officer R.G. had handcuffed them to the foot of a table in an office, and that they had been kept in this position for several hours, including in sight of their worried mother, who had gone to see what had happened to them. Such treatment was undoubtedly degrading, at the least, and could not be justified, given the circumstances of the case, either by the needs of the ongoing investigation or by the applicants’ alleged verbal aggression.   Furthermore, the Court could not accept that, following the death of one individual, namely police officer R.G., the unlawful nature of his actions had remained unacknowledged and had even been totally ignored in the decisions by the prosecutor’s office and national courts, in spite of indubitable evidence included in the case file by the investigating bodies.   Accordingly, the Court considered that the treatment sustained by the applicants, in being handcuffed to the leg of a table in the police station, did not correspond to a use of force made strictly necessary by their behaviour, and concluded that there had been a violation of Article 3.   As to the investigations   The Court pointed out, firstly, that it had already held that military prosecutors who were required to investigate following a criminal complaint alleging ill-treatment by police officers were not independent. The Court then noted that this lack of independence on the part of military prosecutors and courts had been tangibly expressed in both cases by the lack of impartiality with which they had conducted the investigations concerning the accused police officers.   In the Lupaşcu case, the Court noted, in particular, that the prosecutor responsible for the investigation had not indicated in his decision of 15 October 2001 whether, by immobilising the applicant with handcuffs against his will in order to take him to the police station, the police officers had exceeded their powers, given that they did not possess an arrest warrant. In addition, there was no reference in that decision to the extremely violent investigation methods used by the police officers to extract a confession, although the applicant had complained of those methods to the prosecutor’s office and had described them exhaustively.   In the case of Niţă , the Court noted, among other points, that neither the prosecutors nor the courts had attempted to investigate the doubts which existed as to the dental fractures found on the applicants by stomatologist, by ordering an expert report on their health or by conducting an investigation into the origin of the medical certificate drawn up shortly after the incidents in question.   In the light of the above, the Court considered that the Romanian authorities had not conducted thorough and effective investigations into the allegations of ill-treatment made by the applicants. It therefore concluded, unanimously, that there had been a further violation of Article 3 in both cases.     ***   The Court’s judgments are accessible on its Internet site ( http://www.echr.coe.int ).   Press contacts Adrien Raif-Meyer (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 88 41 33 37) Tracey Turner-Tretz (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 88 41 35 30) Sania Ivedi (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 90 21 59 45)   The European Court of Human Rights was set up in Strasbourg by the Council of Europe Member States in 1959 to deal with alleged violations of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. [1] Under Article 43 of the Convention, within three months from the date of a Chamber judgment, any party to the case may, in exceptional cases, request that the case be referred to the 17 ‑ member Grand Chamber of the Court. In that event, a panel of five judges considers whether the case raises a serious question affecting the interpretation or application of the Convention or its protocols, or a serious issue of general importance, in which case the Grand Chamber will deliver a final judgment. If no such question or issue arises, the panel will reject the request, at which point the judgment becomes final. Otherwise Chamber judgments become final on the expiry of the three-month period or earlier if the parties declare that they do not intend to make a request to refer. [2] This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.