The bad news from Strasbourg comes to confirm a situation that everyone in the country has been well aware of. Detention conditions in Romanian penitentiaries run counter to the European Convention on Human Rights, being indicative of a structural dysfunction in the field. Therefore, general measures must be adopted by the state, the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, underlines. Romania has six months at its disposal to come up with a timetable and a package of measures to solve prison overcrowding and improper detention conditions.
By this pilot decision issued on Tuesday, the court has fined Romania some 17,850 Euros and decided to postpone analysing in court similar complaints until Bucharest authorities come up with a set of measures they consider necessary. At the moment, official statistical figures point to a deficit of over 11,000 jobs and a degree of occupancy of over 200% in eight of the 44 Romanian penitentiaries. Some of the possible solutions include building new prisons or expanding the already existing detention space, pardoning detainees with short sentences and shortening the length of sentences in certain conditions or placing some detainees under home arrest.
Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu has announced he has already analysed the ECHR ruling together with justice minister, Tudorel Toader, and has expressed confidence that the latter will draft the set of measures in due time. Pardoning or home arrest can only solve the issue of prison overcrowding on short term, says the director of the National Administration of Penitentiaries, Marius Vulpe, who suggests that new detention centres should be built: “In the long run, the only solution is to build new detention centres and refurbish the old ones. Sentences are granted based on these very grounds. Pardoning or home arrest do not solve the situation in penitentiaries. Resources should be invested to modernise prisons and increase accommodation capacity”.
Former justice minister, Titus Corlatean, recently elected vice-president of the Council of Europe PA, has said the deadline set by ECHR is rather short: “It will not be easy at all, during this period of 6 months, to draft a coherent plan, which should become reality, which entails resources allocated to the project and a consistent decision making process at domestic level.”
Experts say that no matter how expensive the measures to be adopted might seem, they will be a profitable investment, considering that in the past years alone, the Romanian state paid over 2 million Euros worth of damages to the detainees who won the cases they referred to ECHR against the Romanian state, deploring the improper conditions in penitentiaries.
