Published on 20 February 2023

FIFTH SECTION

Application no. 41036/16 Ivan Ivanovych KARPENKO against Ukraine lodged on 25 June 2016 communicated on 1 February 2023

SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE

The applicant is serving a life sentence. He complained under Article 8 of the Convention that the prison administration had unlawfully reviewed his correspondence and under Article 6 § 1 that the proceedings in which he attempted to challenge the administration’s actions had been unfair in that no hearing with his participation had been held and that the domestic courts failed to adequately reason their decisions.

According to the applicant, on 21 May 2014 he handed a sealed envelope with stamps to a prison officer in order to have it dispatched to the High Administrative Court. Domestic regulations indeed provide that prisoners’ correspondence should be dispatched to the courts in sealed envelopes without any review. According to the applicant he later discovered that, in breach of the regulations, the envelope had been opened and its content had been dispatched to the HAC with a cover letter from the prison authorities.

In September 2014 the applicant challenged the actions of the prison authorities. The first-instance tribunal and the Kharkiv Administrative Court of Appeal rejected the applicant’s requests to be heard through videoconference on the grounds that such procedure was not provided for by domestic law. They held a hearing without the parties and rejected the applicant’s claim. The courts found that the prison correspondence register indicated that the applicant had given to the prison authorities correspondence to a court rather than a “sealed envelope”, which for the courts indicated that it had been the applicant himself who had failed to submit his correspondence in a sealed envelope. On 24 December 2015 the High Administrative Court upheld the lower courts’ decisions.

In prior proceedings concerning a similar incident on 20 May 2014 (which concerned correspondence to the High Specialised Civil and Criminal Court) the same Court of Appeal held, on 28 October 2015, that the prison administration had acted unlawfully in accepting from the applicant a letter to the HSCCC not in a sealed envelope, as under the relevant regulations it could only accept sealed correspondence to the courts and, if the applicant had no such envelope, it would have been up to the administration to provide it to him.

QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES

1. Did the applicant have a fair hearing in the determination of his civil rights and obligations, in accordance with Article 6 § 1 of the Convention (see Bochan v. Ukraine (no. 2) [GC], no. 22251/08, § 61, ECHR 2015; Ramos Nunes de Carvalho e Sá v. Portugal [GC], nos. 55391/13, 57728/13 and 74041/13, §§ 185, 187-91, 6 November 2018, with further references)?

2. Has there been a violation of the applicant’s right to respect for his correspondence, contrary to Article 8 of the Convention (see Glinov v. Ukraine , no. 13693/05, §§ 54-61, 19 November 2009, and as an example of application of those principles, Vasilenko v. Ukraine , no. 70777/12, §§ 6 ‑ 10, 13 January 2022 [Committee])?