The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Croatia violated the human rights of a prisoner by failing to conduct an efficient investigation into his abuse in prison, in an incident in which he sustained serious injuries during an intervention by prison officers.

The applicant’s complaint referred to the excessive use of force applied against him by prison guards in October 2016 during an inspection of his cell in a prison in Split where he was serving his sentence.

In January 2018 the Split County Prosecutor’s Office dismissed the applicant’s criminal complaint, concluding that since the findings of the medical examination allowed for the possibility that the injuries could have been sustained due to different reasons, there were no grounds to suspect that he had been intentionally injured by prison officers.

Even though the applicant did not file a constitutional complaint, the ECHR ruled that his motion was admissible because such complaints became an effective domestic legal remedy for inefficient investigations only in 2019, the office of the Croatian representative at the ECHR said.

The ECHR ruled that the investigation in the case had not been launched immediately after the event but only six months later, based on a subsequent criminal complaint. The prosecutor’s office dismissed it without carefully considering all relevant facts and without questioning the applicant and the prison guards, even though the medical documentation available to it allowed for several different scenarios as to the possible causes of the injuries.

The ECHR therefore ruled that the investigation had not been conducted efficiently, resulting in a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights in the procedural aspects, and that the applicant had provided sufficient material for a strong presumption that he suffered grave injuries by being punched and kicked by prison guards while lying on the floor of his prison cell, due to which he was hospitalised and had to undergo surgery.

Considering that Croatia did not present a convincing explanation about the injuries having been inflicted otherwise and that the investigation was not implemented in line with the standards set by the Convention, the ECHR ruled that the Convention was violated also from the substantive point of view, ordering that the applicant be paid a sum of €12,000 by way of compensation for non-material damage and €3,000 for court costs.