The claimant sought judicial review of decisions that the claimant had committed a disciplinary offence whilst in custody at a Young Offenders Institute.
Held: The claim failed.
Pitchford LJ considered the ECHR jurisprudence, and said: ‘In the series of prison cases [Ganci, Gulmez, Enea and Stegarescu] the European Court recognized as personal, and therefore ‘civil’, those residual rights prisoners claimed to enjoy by virtue of the ‘normal’ prison regime subject to legitimate executive action to remove them . . When a person receives a custodial sentence he forfeits the freedom (and the right) to associate with whomever he wishes but he does not, in my view, thereby forfeit his right of association with all his fellow human beings. He does not, in other words, receive a sentence of solitary or cellular confinement. The YOI Rules and the system of privileges described by PSO4000 implicitly recognise the basic right of the prisoner to associate with his fellows during certain activities which the YOI Rules require the Secretary of State to provide. I accept the Secretary of State’s submission that the extent of the ‘basic’ association to which the inmate will be entitled, subject to the performance of his statutory duty, in the discretion of the governor of the institution; but, in my view, the existence of that discretion does not remove from association its quality as a personal right. It is a right which is subject to the lawful exercise of discretion by the governor. There can, it seems to me, be no doubt that a prisoner has the right of access to a court if he asserts that the governor has arbitrarily removed him from any association with those of his fellow inmates with whom he would normally enjoy joint activities. That right of access to the courts exists because association is one of those residual rights which the prisoner retains subject to the lawful exercise of disciplinary or other powers. This, I think, is the distinction between the case of a prisoner and the case of the discretionary recipient of a welfare or other benefit . . I accept that within the autonomous meaning afforded to ‘civil rights’ by the European court a right of association, in the sense I have described it, is a civil right.’
Pitchford LJ, Maddison J
[2010] EWHC 2522 (Admin), [2011] ACD 13, [2011] 1 WLR 2667, [2010] UKHRR 1245
Bailii
The Young Offender Institution Rules 2000
England and Wales
Citing:
Cited – Ganci v Italie ECHR 30-Oct-2003
The applicant was serving two life sentences for Mafia related activities. He challenged nine decrees issued by the Minister of Justice under which he was held under a special prison regime for a period of four years. His case related to delays by . .
Cited – Gulmez v Turkey ECHR 20-May-2008
The applicant complained inter alia of successive decisions which had deprived him of visitation rights for about a year as punishment for disciplinary offences whilst in prison.
Held: ‘the restriction on the applicant’s visiting rights . .
Cited – Enea v Italy ECHR 17-Sep-2009
(Grand Chamber) The applicant, a prisoner serving a long sentence for Mafia-type criminal offences, was subjected to a special regime by ministerial decrees. The restrictions included not only very limited family visits but also a long period . .
Cited – Stegarescu and Bahrin v Portugal ECHR 6-Apr-2010
The two applicants complained that they had been held in solitary confinement for seven months after receipt of intelligence about an escape plan.
Held: There had been a violation of the prisoners’ article 6 rights. They had been given no . .
Cited by:
Appeal from – King, Regina (on The Application of) v Secretary of State for Justice CA 27-Mar-2012
In each case the prisoners challenged their transfer to cellular confinement or segregation within prison or YOI, saying that the transfers infringed their rights under Article 6, saying that domestic law, either in itself or in conjunction with . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Prisons, Human Rights
Updated: 01 November 2021; Ref: scu.425204