The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued another conviction against Greece in relation to the conditions in the prisons in the country.
The trial started when 16 prisoners from Nafplio prison (Greeks, Romanians, Ukrainians, Turks and Americans) turned to the Court in Strasbourg, complaining of prison conditions and the lack of space due to overcrowding in the cells in particular.
"This violates Article 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, according to which no human being should be subjected to inhumane, degrading treatment, nor tortured", explains for the electronic edition kathimerini.gr Konstantinos Tsitselikis, one of the lawyers in the case and Associate Professor at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki.
This sentence is part of a series of similar decisions, as over the past five years the European Court has established similar violations in other Greek prisons, such as Korydallos, Komotini, Ioannina, Thessaloniki and Tripoli, reminds the Professor.
"The violations are related not only to the lack of space due to overcrowding, but also to the insufficient medical care provided to prisoners", adds the lawyer who took on the case along with Antonis Spatis.
According to the decision of the European Court of Justice, each prisoner who filed a complaint will be paid compensation amounting to 5,000-15,000 euro for having suffered damages due to the violation of Article 3 of the European Convention. The exact amount of the compensation will be determined according to the sentence that each of the prisoners is serving.
Simultaneously, the state is obliged to take care to avoid the future creation of conditions in favour of the violation of prisoners’ rights.
"There is a bad precedent related to the prison in Ioannina, where the European Court has established violations three times and fiercely criticized Greece, noting that it thus violates Article 3," concludes Associate Professor Tsitselikis.