On 8 April 2016, two local police officers in Oradea fined a woman and her mother for leaving household waste beside the wrong bin. Within hours, the incident had left the street and entered a Facebook group with more than 24,000 members. Nine years later, the European Court of Human Rights has used that ordinary,…
Category: Case law
The Use of Sound Weapons Against Peaceful Demonstrators as a Threat to Human Rights and a Factor Undermining Trust in the Police (Đorović and Others v. Serbia)
On 15 March 2025, Belgrade saw one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in Serbia’s recent history, the culmination of a protest movement that had been building for months after the collapse of a concrete canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad in November 2024, in which people died. Students and a significant part of…
“Proper” Torture: How Ukrainian Society Is Learning to Justify Torture, or the Case of the Odesa Detention Center as a Window into the Abyss
The incident that occurred in the Odesa pre-trial detention centre (SIZO) and that, in a very strange way, came to light and drew the attention of the entire society, is telling and extremely important. Not because it is unique – on the contrary, because it is mundane. It demonstrates the abyss that Ukrainian society has…
Training for Trainers on Human Rights Protection in Places of Detention
On 4-5 December 2025 The Centre for European Constitutional Law (CECL), in partnership with the European Prison Litigation Network and the Human Rights Centre ZMINA, hosted a specialised Training of Trainers on the Protection of Fundamental Rights in Detention in Athens. The two-day intensive programme formed part of the DIGNITY project, an initiative co-funded by…
Call for Papers: Wartime Crisis Mode: Crime, Justice and Social Control in Armed Conflicts in Europe
Call for Papers Wartime Crisis Mode: Crime, Justice and Social Control in Armed Conflicts in Europe Edited by Dr. Dmytro Yagunov, Prof. Dr. Rita Haverkamp and Dr. Tetiana Melnychuk Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Endowed Professorship of Crime Prevention and Risk Management Supported by the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation About the…
Dmytro Yagunov: Police Training and the European Human Rights Standards
The CPT standards on prevention of ill-treatment in policing are strictly linked to the issue of police trainings. Every national report made by the CPT on torture prevention in policing contains recommendations to improve the system of police trainings with the aim to exclude excessive use of force by the police and to avoid unnecessary…
Wartime Crisis Mode: The Impact of Russia’s Aggression on the System of Social Control in Ukraine (Crime, Institutes, and Trust in Criminal Justice)
The 21st century is the time of polycrisis, characterised by its temporal and spatial boundaries and cascading effects (Covid-19 pandemics, climate change, the war in Ukraine, mass migration caused by the war in Ukraine and other armed conflicts). Moreover, European societies are almost universally in crisis mode, which is linked to an accelerating process of…
Maryna Demura: The State of Compliance with Fundamental Human Rights Guarantees in Criminal Proceedings Under Martial Law
Access to a lawyer is an important guarantee of the right to a fair trial, the right to defence, the presumption of innocence and other fundamental rights. In Ukraine, representation in courts and public authorities is carried out exclusively by lawyers (advocates)[1]. Article 213 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine (CPC) obliges the official who carried out…