A.P. v Slovakia (third-party intervention, 2020)
05 March 2018
Facts
The case concerns a sixteen year-old Romani student who complained that he was beaten by police officers outside his school. They tried to get him to confess to a minor offence. His complaint was investigated but ultimately rejected by prosecutors and Slovakia’s Constitutional Court.
The ERRC’s Third-Party Intervention
We urged the Court to acknowledge the existence of institutional antigypsyism among police forces around Europe generally and in Slovakia in particular. Relying on widely accepted definitions of the terms “antigypsyism” and “institutional racism”, we set out the evidence of widespread institutional antigypsyism among police in Europe, citing data and incidents from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. We then provided detailed information about the significant number of incidents of police brutality targeting Roma in Slovakia in recent years, a problem which has been condemned by UN and Council of Europe bodies. We noted the widespread use of a particular police action code in Romani communities with violent consequences, which the Slovak Ombudsperson had investigated. We also noted how institutional antigypsyism among police in Slovakia has been supported by explicitly stereotypical statements about Roma and crime by the Prime Minister and Interior Minister. We also pointed to Interior Ministry policies targeting Romani communities and which appear designed solely to stigmatise Roma. We then argued that institutional antigypsyism demands a particular response from the Court in the context of police brutality complaints and described how the Court should analyse the case under the relevant provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The European Court's Judgment
On 28 January 2020, the European Court delivered its judgment.
The Court found that A.P. - the person who complained to the Court - had been a victim of degrading treatment by police. A.P. had swollen upper lip and bruising to the nose after the incident. So it was up to the Slovak Government to show that this was not a case of ill-treatment by police. The Government failed to show that. This amounted to a violation of what is called the "substantive limb" of Article 3. That article refers to the prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.
The European Court also found a violation of what is called the "procedural limb" of Article 3. This means that the authorities in Slovakia did not properly investigate the complaints about degrading treatment.
On this basis, the European Court awarded A.P. €5,000. This is the amount that the Slovak Government must pay him as a result of those violations.
But the European Court rejected A.P.'s claim that the police violence and failure to investigate were discriminatory. The Court found that there was insufficient evidence that the police acted in a way that was discriminatory based on A.P.'s ethnicity. So they said that the discrimination claim was "manifestly ill-founded" and did not need to be considered.
Two of the seven judges who decided the case disagreed on the discrimination. They wrote was is called a "dissenting opinion". Those two judges mentioned the ERRC's third-party intervention and said that "Confronted with the degrading treatment of a Roma boy by police against a background of racial tension", the Court should have considered the claim of discrimination, instead of dismissing it as manifestly ill-founded.
The Court’s statement of facts can be found here.
The ERRC’s third-party intervention can be found here.
