Background
Ruslan Yeryomenko, a Ukrainian national born in 1986, served a prison sentence at Oleksiyivska Prison No. 25 in Kharkiv from October 2011 to December 2015. Shortly after his release he complained to prosecutors that prison staff had systematically tortured him throughout his detention: he described repeated beatings with a rubber truncheon to his head and body, and being forced to lie naked on the floor while officers stood on him and burned his face, hands, and groin with lit cigarettes. A forensic medical examination conducted in January 2017 documented numerous scars consistent with those descriptions, including linear scars from blunt-force trauma and small oval scars assessed as likely resulting from second- and third-degree burns caused by brief contact with a heat source.
The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) had visited Oleksiyivska Prison three times while the applicant was detained there — in December 2012, October 2013, and September 2014 — and on each occasion reported a climate of severe fear and intimidation. The CPT described allegations of ill-treatment “far from uncommon” and of “such severity that it could be considered as amounting to torture,” including extensive beatings, sexual assaults, and positional asphyxia. The CPT observed that prisoners appeared “virtually scared to death” and concluded the establishment was managed through a system of intimidation and violence.
A criminal investigation was opened in October 2013 following a press conference by human rights activists and former prisoners. The applicant’s complaint was joined to that investigation in April 2016. Between April 2016 and August 2021, the investigation was discontinued six times — five times by the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office and once by the State Bureau of Investigation — each time citing lack of evidence and relying principally on denials by prison staff and supportive witness statements from certain inmates. Each of the first five discontinuation decisions was quashed by a domestic court as premature and superficial; the sixth and most recent decision, issued on 20 August 2021, remained in force at the time of the Court’s judgment.
The Court’s Holding
The Court held unanimously that Ukraine violated Article 3 of the Convention under both its substantive and procedural heads. On the substantive limb, the Court found the applicant’s account of systematic torture credible. The forensic evidence of his injuries — linear scalp and forearm scars consistent with truncheon blows and oval burn scars consistent with cigarette contact on the face, hands, and groin — was undisputed. Neither the government nor the domestic investigators ever provided an alternative explanation for those injuries or refuted that they were sustained in prison. The Court rejected the government’s argument that there was “no evidence” prison officers caused the injuries as an improper attempt to reverse the burden of proof. Taking into account the nature of the ill-treatment (including cigarette burns to intimate areas), its aim of debasing the applicant and driving him into submission, and its duration of more than four years, the Court found the treatment amounted to torture.
On the procedural limb, the Court found that the State’s obligation to conduct an effective investigation had been triggered no later than September 2013, when the CPT published its report documenting grave concerns about Oleksiyivska Prison. The investigation that followed was chronically deficient: the same discontinuation decisions were issued repeatedly without addressing the applicant’s specific allegations or the forensic expert report, courts consistently found the investigation incomplete and superficial, and judicial instructions to conduct identification parades, investigative experiments, and analysis of video surveillance footage were systematically disregarded. The Court held that the pattern of repeated remittals without rectification of identified shortcomings disclosed a serious systemic deficiency in the domestic prosecution system.
Ukraine was ordered to pay the applicant EUR 30,000 in non-pecuniary damages and EUR 2,200 in costs and expenses, with interest accruing at the European Central Bank marginal lending rate plus three percentage points if payment was not made within three months.
Key Takeaways
- Forensic medical evidence documenting injuries consistent with a detainee’s account, left unexplained by the government, can establish the substantive violation of Article 3 and shifts the evidential burden to the State.
- Repeated discontinuation of a criminal investigation using virtually identical reasoning — without addressing the victim’s allegations or expert evidence — constitutes a violation of the procedural obligation under Article 3, regardless of whether individual decisions were formally quashed and remitted.
- CPT reports documenting systemic ill-treatment in a specific facility are relevant corroborating evidence and independently trigger the State’s procedural obligation under Article 3 to investigate, even before individual complaints are lodged.
- A civil damages remedy alone is not an effective domestic remedy where the complaint concerns wilful ill-treatment by State agents; prosecution and punishment of those responsible is required.
Why It Matters
This judgment reinforces that the procedural obligation under Article 3 demands genuine investigative effort, not merely formal compliance. Where a State repeatedly closes and reopens an investigation without ever substantively engaging with the victim’s evidence, the cumulative failure — rather than any single procedural step — constitutes the violation. The ruling is a reminder to practitioners that exhaustion of domestic remedies does not require a victim to perpetually challenge each successive discontinuation decision where the investigation has been demonstrably ineffective for years.
The case also illustrates the evidentiary weight the Court assigns to CPT reports. The three successive CPT visits documenting a climate of terror at Oleksiyivska Prison were treated as independent corroboration of the applicant’s account, underscoring that systematic findings by monitoring bodies can both trigger State obligations and bolster individual complaints brought years later. For prison systems across Council of Europe member states, the judgment serves as a stark warning that institutional cultures of violence, once documented by the CPT, will be difficult to disavow when individual victims later seek accountability in Strasbourg.