Contents - Constitutional Court of Georgia

The European Courtof Human Rights is Fifty. Recent trends in the Court’s jurisprudence
party, was urging the Court to abandon the Chahal case-law, the Court (Grand Chamber)
unanimously reaffirmed that the expulsion of the applicant, suspected but not convicted
of terrorist activities, to Tunisia, where he faces a substantive risk of being subjected to
torture, would constitute a violation of Article 3.
Article 4. Prohibition of slavery and forced labour
In the landmark Siliadin v. France judgment of 26 July 2005, the Court for the first time
applied this provision in a situation of domestic servitude – a young Togolese woman employed
by a French couple in a situation that, in the Court’s eyes, amounted to servitude
(she worked in their house for about fifteen hours each day, without a day off, for several
years, without being paid, with no identity papers and immigration status). In this case,
the Court confirms that States have positive obligations to adopt a criminal legislation that
penalises the practices prohibited by Article 4 and to apply it in practice – this means effective
prosecutions. A decisive factor was that neither slavery nor servitude were classified as
offences as such under French criminal law.
Article 5. Right to liberty and security
In the case of Gusinskiy v. Russia 55 , the Court found not only a violation of Article 5 of
the Convention but also a violation of Article 18 of the Convention, which provides that the
restrictions permitted under the Convention “shall not be applied for any purpose other
than those for which they have been prescribed”. An agreement which had been signed by
an Acting Minister linked the dropping of certain charges against the applicant to the sale
of his media company to a State-controlled company. The Court pointed out that “it is not
the purpose of such public law matters as criminal proceedings and detention on remand
to be used as part of commercial bargaining strategies” and found that the proposal for the
agreement while the applicant was in detention strongly suggested that the prosecution
was being used to intimidate him. Thus, although the detention was for the purpose of
bringing the applicant before a competent court under Article 5 § 1 (c), it was also applied
for other reasons.
Concerning the specific situation of psychiatric detention (Art. 5 § 1), the Storck v. Germany
judgment of 16 June 2005 is a leading case. At her father’s request, the applicant was
confined in a locked ward at a private psychiatric institution, for more than twenty months.
Noting that the applicant, who had attained the age of majority at the time of the acts, had
not been placed under guardianship, had neither consented to her stay in the clinic nor
to her medical treatment and had been brought back to the clinic by force by the police
55 ECtHR, Gusinskiy v. Russia, judgment of 19 May 2004.
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