Consistency in upholding the European Convention on HR in domestic law.

political analyst

Although sentences of imprisonment for public protection (IPP sentences), which are indefinite, were abolished by the British government in 2012, that abolition is not retrospective. Therefore, prisoners who were given IPP sentences before the abolition still had to serve those sentences.

Given that the European Court of Human Rights ruled that IPP sentences were in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, why did the Convention not obliged the British government to have prisoners who were given IPP sentences before the abolition resentenced. After all, human rights are, obviously, for all human beings and so the Convention has to be upheld consistently by a member state of the Council of Europe in that state's domestic law, doesn't it?

Peregrinus

The ECHR didn't rule that indefinite sentences were absolutely incompatible with the Convention; just that they way they were being administered in the UK in 2012 was incompatible with the Convention. Specifically, the UK system at the time allowed for IPP prisoners to be released when they could satisfy the authorities that they had been rehabilitated and no longer posed a public danger, but the UK authorities did not provide IPP prisoners with opportunities for rehabilitation or opportunities to demonstrate rehabilitation. This meant that IPP prisoners were released, in effect, on the caprice of the Home Secretary, when he or she decided that they were rehabilitated — a decision which might be, um, coloured by considerations of pressure on prison spaces, public sentiment, the notoriety of a particular prisoner, the nearness of an impending election and other matters that have little to do with rehabilitation. The court held that this violated the Convention prohibition on arbitrary detention.

The UK responded by making a number of changes, one of which was a ban on imposing new IPP sentences. But another measure was the implementation of a system of courses and assessments through which existing IPP prisoners could pursue rehabilitation, and the Parole Board could make rehabilitation assessments. This aimed to cure the defect identified by the ECHR in the 2012 case.

With this system in place, the UK could in fact have continued to impose new IPP sentences, but they chose not to.

It's still open to an IPP prisoner to challenge the legality of their detention, either on the grounds that this system of rehabilitation and assessment doesn't work and their detention is still arbitrary, or on some other grounds.