Prepared by the Division on Migration and Refugees, Directorate of Human Rights, DGI
no. 48302/21, 6 May 2025
The applicants are a married couple and their adult daughter. The first applicant is a Turkish national, and the second and third applicants are Hungarian nationals. In 2010 the first applicant obtained a Hungarian permanent residence status valid for ten years; in 2014 he was convicted of causing serious bodily harm. In 2020 his application for a national settlement permit was rejected as his presence in Hungary had been considered a risk to national security; his appeals were unsuccessful, and in 2021 he was removed from the Hungarian territory.
The first applicant complained before the Court that he had been expelled from Hungary without having been afforded the guarantees of Article 1 of Protocol No. 7 to the Convention (“Procedural safeguards relating to expulsion of aliens”). The Court reiterated that Article 1 § 1 of Protocol No. 7 requires in principle that the aliens concerned be informed of the relevant factual elements which have led the competent domestic authorities to consider that they represent a threat to national security and that they be given access to the content of the documents and the information in the case file on which those authorities relied when deciding on their expulsion. Having established that the first applicant had not been informed of the allegations against him to enable him effectively to exercise his procedural rights under Article 1 of Protocol No. 7, and that the restriction of the first applicant’s procedural rights in the proceedings relating to his expulsion had not been counterbalanced in the domestic proceedings in such a way as to preserve the very essence of those rights and to protect him against arbitrariness, the Court found a violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 7 to the Convention.
The Court left the first applicant’s remaining complaints under Articles 8 and 13 of the Convention unexamined. The second and third applicants’ complaint under Article 8 about the separation of their family was rejected as being incompatible ratione materiae with the provisions of the Convention.
[GC], dec., no. 63386/16, 29 April 2025
The applicant, a Tunisian national born in 1976, lawfully resided in Italy for two years. While he was visiting Tunisia, his residence permit issued by the Italian authorities expired, and his application for a long-term stay in Italy was denied. On 1 May 2016, while travelling back to Italy on board a cruise ship flying the Italian flag, the applicant was issued with a refusal-of-entry order at the Palermo maritime border. The captain of the cruise ship received a request to “immediately take charge of a foreign national refused entry to Italy and to convey him or her to another State”, following which the applicant spent seven days of the ship’s return voyage to Tunisia confined to a cabin.
The applicant complained before the Court under Article 5 §§ 1, 2, 4 and 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“the Convention”) about various violations of his right to liberty, as well as under Articles 3 and 13 of the Convention about material conditions of his de facto detention in the cabin and the lack of effective domestic remedies in this respect.
The Court ruled that it had jurisdiction to decide on the case as the State responsibility of Italy was engaged and that the events complained of were attributable to the respondent State.
The Court did not examine the question whether the applicant had been deprived of liberty within the meaning of Article 5 § 1 of the Convention while in the cabin on the way to Tunisia given that in any case the applicant had failed to exhaust domestic remedies; the complaints under Article 5 §§ 1, 2, 4 and 5 were thus dismissed. The applicant’s complaints regarding the material conditions of his seven-day return voyage to Tunis on board of the ship and the alleged lack of domestic remedies in this respect were declared manifestly ill-founded under Article 35 of the Convention.
The application was thus declared inadmissible.
Almukhlas and Al-Maliki v. Greece
no. 22776/18, 25 March 2025
On 29 August 2015 a vessel carrying over ninety irregular migrants was intercepted near the island of Symi, Greece. Following the use of firearms by a coast guard officer who was aiming at one of the skippers of the vessel, the applicants’ son, a minor of an Iraqi origin, was fatally shot. Subsequently the Greek authorities instituted two sets of criminal proceedings concerning homicide and the use of arms against the coast guard who had fired the fatal shot; both cases were closed without any charges brought.
The applicants complained before the European Court of Human Rights under Article 2 of the ECHR (right to life) about the manner in which the interception operation had been carried out, the excessive use of lethal force in its course, and the ineffectiveness of the investigation into their son’s death.
The Court considered that the investigation by the Greek authorities had been plagued by serious omissions (only eight passengers out of ninety-three had been questioned as witnesses; the investigation lacked in independence; a key forensic expert examination had not been carried out) and had not allowed to establish the exact circumstances of the death of the applicants’ son; it thus found a violation of Article 2 in its procedural limb. The Court further found a violation of Article 2 in its substantive limb because the interception operation had not been conducted in such a way as to bring the use of lethal force and the risks to life and limb of the applicant’s son to the minimum. In view of the lack of the elements sufficient to establish all circumstances of the incident beyond reasonable doubt, the Court considered that the use of lethal force had been no more than “absolutely necessary” and found no violation of Article 2 in its substantive limb on that account.
no. 4662/22, 25 March 2025
In 2021 the applicant, who had participated in the anti-governmental protests in Bahrain in 2007 and 2011, was arrested in Serbia, where he had come to seek asylum, on the basis of an international search warrant issued following his in absentia conviction for terrorist-related crimes in Bahrain. He applied to the Court alleging that if extradited he would be subjected to ill-treatment proscribed by Article 3 of the ECHR (prohibition of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment) and successfully sought the application of interim measures under Rule 39 of the Rules of Court to stay his extradition pending the examination of his application. In 2022 the Serbian authorities, relying on Bahrain’s diplomatic assurances, extradited the applicant in spite of the interim measures applied.
The applicant complained that at the time of his extradition there had been substantial grounds for believing that he would be tortured if extradited and that the Serbian courts had failed to take his allegations into account when deciding on his extradition.
The Court found a procedural violation of Article 3 of the ECHR on the grounds that the Serbian authorities had not examined the risks of the applicant being subjected to ill-treatment in the requesting country before extraditing him to Bahrain and had not assessed his personal situation. Also, a violation of Article 34 of the ECHR was found on account of the Serbian authorities’ failure to comply with the interim measures indicated by the Court.