European monitoring of Belgian and French penal and prison policies

Abstract

Case studies of prison policy in France and Belgium contrast sharply. Following the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECHR‘) against France for the lack of healthcare for prisoners, the lack of suicide-prevention measures and generally poor conditions of detention, and the integration of ECHR case-law into French law by the ‘Council of State‘ (France’s highest administrative court), France has developed a policy for suicide prevention in custody, partially renovated its prisons and implemented major reform of its medical and psychiatric care of prisoners. The ECHR’s judgments were influenced by complaints made by very active French human-rights pressure groups to the ECHR. The French situation is therefore characterised by interactions between the European and national regulatory bodies, in contrast to the situation in Belgium, where the Conseil d’etat has exerted only limited control over Belgian prisons, as it has, to date, not incorpated ECHR case-law into Belgian law [1]. In addition, the absence of effective domestic regulation of prisons in Belgium can be explained by the Belgian government’s failure to ratify the United Nations’ Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (‘OPCAT‘) and to establish an independent body to prevent torture. This means that the only effective regulation of Belgian prisons is by the United Nations and the Council of Europe, in particular the ECHR, the Committee of Ministers and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture (‘CPT‘), which have extended the scope of their supervision to cover suicide prevention, physical and mental healthcare, overcrowding and domestic legal remedies for prisoners. In response, Belgium has only occasionally complied with ECHR case-law, especially in the field of domestic legal remedies available to prisoners.