The Evolving Protection of Prisoners' Rights in Europe

The Evolving Protection of Prisoners’ Rights in Europe explores the development of the framing of penal and prison policies by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), clarifying the European expectations of national authorities, and describing the various models existing in Europe, with a view to analysing their mechanisms and highlighting those that seem the most suitable.

A new frame of penal and prison policies in Europe has been progressively established by the ECHR and the Council of Europe (CoE) to protect the rights of detainees in Europe. European countries have reacted very diversely to these policies. This book has several key benefits for readers:

• A global and detailed overview of the ECHR jurisprudence on penal and prison policies through an analysis of its development over time.

• An analysis of the interactions between the Strasbourg Court and the CoE bodies (Committee of Ministers, Committee for the Prevention of Torture …) and their reinforced framing of domestic penal and prison policies.

• A detailed examination of the impacts of the European case law on penal and prison policies within ten nation states in Europe (including Romania which is currently very underresearched).

• A robust engagement with the diverse national reactions to this European case law as a policy strategy.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Law, Criminal Justice, Criminology and Sociology. It will also appeal to civil servants (judges, lawyers, etc.), professionals and policymakers working for the CoE, the European Union, and the United Nations; Ministries of Justice; prison departments; and human rights institutions, as well as activists working for INGOs and NGOs.

Gaëtan Cliquennois holds dual PhD in Sociology of Law from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, and the University of Saint-Louis, Belgium. From 2010 to 2013, Gaëtan was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the FNRS, Belgium, and worked on human rights in penal and prison matters. He was also Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and at the London School of Economics, UK. Since 2013, he has been a permanent Research Fellow for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Strasbourg, France (SAGE: Societies, Actors and Governments in Europe) and since 2018 at the University of Nantes, France. Since February 2021, he is the Director of Law and Social Change and works in the field of Law and Sociology of Law. As a Visiting Scholar at the European University Institute, he worked on the relationships between human rights and austerity policies. He has also worked on the creeping privatization of human rights and the European justice system. He has expertise in European human rights justice, the potential privatization of this system, litigation, penal and prison policies and management in Europe, and prison monitoring and strategic litigation by prisoners, NGOs and private foundations. In 2014, he was awarded an IDEX by the University of Strasbourg to work on ‘the impact of funding and auditing mechanisms on the protection of Human Rights in Europe in times of crises’. In 2017, he was awarded a grant to work on human rights and pretrial detention for two years by the European Commission.