Published on 3 July 2023

THIRD SECTION

Application no. 48721/22 Andrei ANTONOV against Estonia lodged on 7 October 2022 communicated on 12 June 2023

SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE

The complaint concerns the calculation of a term when a prisoner, who is serving a life sentence but who has been convicted of a new offence since then, can be considered for conditional release.

Under Estonian Penal Code a court may grant conditional release of a life prisoner if he or she has served at least twenty-five years of the sentence.

The applicant has been serving a prison sentence since 18 October 1994. It appears that he was convicted in May 1995 and May 1996 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison on both occasions. He was subsequently convicted again in August 1996, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

On 9 July 2021 the Viru County Court convicted the applicant for having caused a bodily injury to another prisoner and sentenced him to one year and three months’ imprisonment. Under the relevant provisions of the Penal Code this latest punishment was increased by the “unserved part” of his previous life sentence and, as an aggregated punishment ( liitkaristus ), he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Viru County Court considered that the applicant started serving the term of this aggregate punishment on 9 July 2021. The Tartu Court of Appeal upheld the first-instance judgment.

In his appeal on points of law the applicant argued, inter alia , that the term of serving his life sentence should be calculated not from 9 July 2021, but from an earlier date (the applicant referred to 30 January 2004). He argued that the approach adopted by the lower-instance courts to set a new start date for when he could be considered to have begun serving his life sentence meant in practice that his term to be considered for conditional release started running anew. He pointed out several examples of court judgments concerning other life prisoners who had been subsequently sentenced for other offences but in respect of whom the start date of serving their life sentence had not been changed.

The Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on points of law on 10 June 2022. It explained that the start date for serving a life sentence could indeed only be the date of the latest court judgment by which the applicant was convicted, because the “unserved part” of his earlier sentence was determined only at the time that the aggregate punishment was decided. The Supreme Court did not address the question of calculating the term for possible conditional release.

The applicant complains that the resetting of the twenty-five-year term which he had to serve of his life sentence in order to be considered for conditional release violated his rights under Article 3 of the Convention.

QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES

1. Has the applicant exhausted all effective domestic remedies, as required by Article 35 § 1 of the Convention, in relation to his complaint under Article 3 of the Convention concerning the prospect to be considered for conditional release after having served twenty-five years of his life sentence?

In particular, could raising the time prospect of conditional release in the criminal proceedings in which the applicant was most recently convicted be considered as making use of an effective domestic remedy? Are there any other proceedings under domestic law that would allow the applicant to raise the complaint about the manner that the required twenty-five-year term for the purpose of being considered for conditional release should be calculated?

2. Has the applicant been subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, in breach of Article 3 of the Convention, in view of the fact that the start date for serving his life sentence was set anew as of his latest conviction (compare Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom [GC], nos. 66069/09 and 2 others, §§ 119-22, ECHR 2013 (extracts), and T.P. and A.T. v. Hungary , nos. 37871/14 and 73986/14, §§ 41-45 and 48, 4 October 2016)?

3. The applicant is asked to clarify the date as of which he considers that the serving of his life sentence should be calculated for the purpose of determining the required twenty-five-year period to be considered for conditional release.