Criminele Tunesiër met psychische handicap sterft in cel na weigering inname medicijnen - Mensenrechtenhof veroordeelt Frankrijk (en)

Press release issued by the Registrar

CHAMBER JUDGMENT IN THE CASE OF SLIMANI v. FRANCE

The European Court of Human Rights has today notified in writing a judgment¹ in the case of Slimani v. France (application no. 57671/00).

The Court held:

· by five votes to two, that the complaints of substantive breaches of Articles 2 (right to life) and 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights on account of the death of the applicant’s partner and the conditions in which he was held were inadmissible, as the applicant had not exhausted domestic remedies;

· unanimously that there had been no violation of Article 13 of the Convention (right to an effective remedy), taken together with Articles 2 or 3 of the Convention;

· unanimously that there had been a violation of Article 2 of the Convention on account of the applicant’s inability to take part in the inquiry to establish the cause of the death of her partner or to gain access to the information thereby obtained;

· unanimously that it was unnecessary to decide whether the inquiry complied with the procedural requirements of Article 3 of the Convention.

Under Article 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention, the Court awarded the applicant 20,000 euros (EUR) for non-pecuniary damage and EUR 15,000 for costs and expenses.

(The judgment is available only in French.)

• 1. 

  Principal facts

The applicant, Dalila Slimani, is a French national who was born in 1969 and lives in Marseilles. Her partner, Mohsen Sliti, by whom she had two children, was a Tunisian national who was born in 1958. He died in May 1999 while being held in a detention centre pending deportation.

On 2 October 1990 Mr Sliti was sentenced by Marseilles Criminal Court to four years’ imprisonment and an order was made permanently excluding him from French territory. That measure was not executed immediately after he had served his prison sentence.

In 1998 Mr Sliti set fire to the applicant’s home and threatened to throw himself out of the window with his son. He was compulsorily admitted to the Edouard Toulouse Hospital in Marseilles and later transferred to Beaumettes Prison. A number of medical reports stated that he required psychiatric treatment and he received medical treatment in the form of a combination of anti-depressants, tranquillisers and neuroleptics. He was subsequently held in the Marseilles-Arenc Detention Centre pending deportation.

On 26 May 1999 Mr Sliti refused twice to take his medicines. He was taken ill and was transferred to hospital on the same day where he died shortly afterwards. An inquiry was commenced pursuant to Article 74 of the Code of Criminal Procedure in order to “establish the cause of death”. The applicant was refused permission to take part in the inquiry. She applied to the investigating judge and subsequently to the president of the indictment division for an order requiring the inquiry papers to be sent to the public prosecutor with a view to the scope of the inquiry being enlarged to include voluntary homicide. Her application was dismissed, notably on the ground that “she did not have standing to request investigative steps in an inquiry into the cause of death”.

The inquiry established that Mr Sliti had died of cardiac arrest induced by acute pulmonary oedema after an epileptic attack that may have been brought on by his refusal to take his usual medication. It also concluded that the treatment administered at the detention centre by the Samu (Mobile Emergency Medical Service) and subsequently at the hospital was consistent with “current scientific knowledge”. In June 2001 the public prosecutor decided to take no further action in the matter.

• 2. 

  Procedure and composition of the Court

The application was lodged with the European Court of Human Rights on 27 April 2000 and declared partly admissible after a hearing in Strasbourg on 8 April 2003.

Judgment was given by a Chamber of 7 judges, composed as follows:

András Baka (Hungarian), President,

Jean-Paul Costa (French),

Loukis Loucaides (Cypriot),

Corneliu Bîrsan (Romanian),

Karel Jungwiert (Czech),

Mindia Ugrekhelidze (Georgian),

Antonella Mularoni (San Marinese), judges,

and also Sally Dollé, Section Registrar.

• 3. 

  Summary of the judgment²

Complaints

Relying on Article 2 of the Convention, the applicant maintained that her partner had died as a result of serious failings on the part of the authorities. Under Article 3, she complained of the conditions in which he had been held in the detention centre. She also complained that she had not been permitted to take part in the inquiry into the cause of death and, under Article 13, of the inadequate nature of that inquiry.

Decision of the Court

Mr Sliti’s death and the conditions in which he was detained

The French Government submitted that the Court had no jurisdiction to hear the applicant’s complaints, as she had not used either of the two remedies – the one criminal, the other administrative – that had been available to her in the French courts.

The Court noted that under French law Ms Slimani could have lodged a complaint for homicide with the relevant investigating judge and applied to be joined to the proceedings as a civil party. Such a complaint would have set the criminal proceedings in motion and compelled the investigating judge to consider the case. It could have led to the case being referred to the criminal courts. If an order was made not to proceed with the case, it would have been open to the applicant, like anyone who considered that they had been a victim of administrative failings, to claim compensation in the administrative courts for the loss caused by the offence.

The applicant had an accessible remedy under French law that was capable of affording her redress for her complaints under Articles 2 and 3 and provided reasonable prospects of success. Accordingly, she should have used that remedy before applying to the Court. Consequently, the Court had no jurisdiction to examine the merits of the complaints concerning the alleged responsibility of the authorities for Mr Sliti’s death or the conditions in which he had been held at the Marseilles-Arenc Detention Centre. The Court also held that there had been no violation of Article 13, taken together with Article 2 or Article 3, of the Convention.

Conduct of the investigation

Although an inquiry to establish the cause of death was commenced by the authorities of their own motion on the day Mr Sliti died, the applicant was excluded from it: she did not have access to the file, was unable to play any part in the proceedings and was not even informed of the decision to take no further action.

The Court reiterated that when a person in detention died in suspicious circumstances, Article 2 required the authorities to conduct effective official inquiries of their own motion as soon as the case came to their attention to enable the cause of death to be established, and anyone responsible for the death to be identified and punished. To require, as the French Government did, the deceased’s relatives to lodge a complaint with an application to be joined as civil parties if they wish to be involved in the inquiry contravened those principles. As soon as they became aware of a death in suspicious circumstances, the authorities were required to hold an inquiry of their own motion and automatically associate the deceased’s relatives with it.

Compliance with Article 2 of the Convention would have required permitting Ms Slimani to take part in the inquiry into the cause of Mr Sliti’s death without having to lodge a criminal complaint beforehand. Since that did not happen, the Court found that the inquiry by the French authorities was not effective and held that there had been a procedural violation of Article 2.

In view of that finding, the Court did not need to examine whether the inquiry satisfied the requirements of Article 3 of the Convention.

Judge Loucaides, joined by Judge Mularoni, expressed a partly dissenting opinion, which is annexed to the judgment.

***

The Court’s judgments are accessible on its Internet site (http://www.echr.coe.int).

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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. Since 1 November 1998 it has sat as a full-time Court composed of an equal number of judges to that of the States party to the Convention. The Court examines the admissibility and merits of applications submitted to it. It sits in Chambers of 7 judges or, in exceptional cases, as a Grand Chamber of 17 judges. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe supervises the execution of the Court’s judgments. More detailed information about the Court and its activities can be found on its Internet site.