issued by the Registrar of the Court  
no. 093  
03.02.2011  
17-year old’s unlawful detention and questioning without a  
lawyer or his parents amounted to inhuman and degrading  
treatment  
In today’s Chamber judgment in the case Dushka v. Ukraine (application no. 29175/04),  
which is not final1, the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there  
had been:  
Two violations of Article  
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(prohibition of inhuman and degrading  
treatment/lack of effective investigation) of the European Convention on Human  
Rights  
The case concerned Mr Dushka’s allegation that he was tortured in police custody in  
order to make him confess to a robbery, and that the ensuing head and kidney injuries  
as well as stress he had suffered had resulted in his depression and a chronic kidney  
infection.  
Principal facts  
The applicant, Yuriy Dushka, was a Ukrainian national who was born in 1985 and lived in  
Bilgorod-Dnistrovsky (Ukraine) until his death in March 2005. His mother, Tatyana  
Dushka, pursued the application after his death.  
On 18 November 2002 Mr Dushka, 17- years’ old at the time, was arrested in a bar in  
Bilgorod-Dnistrovsky and taken to the local police station for questioning about a  
robbery. Later the same day, having left the police station, he was arrested again when  
walking down a street. Charged with refusal to comply with the lawful demands of the  
police, he was brought before Bilgorod-Dnistrovsky Court which sentenced him to seven  
days’ administrative detention. That decision was made without his parents being  
informed or a lawyer being appointed.  
Mr Dushka claimed that police officers severely ill-treated him during his administrative  
detention. He alleged in particular that, handcuffed to a radiator, he was beaten with a  
plastic water bottle, making him pass out on several occasions. As a result, he confessed  
to the robbery and, without a lawyer or his parents, wrote out confession statements  
dictated by the police. As proof, he provided copies of those statements, which bear only  
his and the officers’ signatures.  
On 19 November 2002 formal criminal proceedings were brought against Mr Dushka for  
robbery. He was released, however, on 21 November 2002, Bilgorod-Dnistrovsky Court  
having reviewed his sentence and reduced it to three days’ detention. Both decisions by  
1 Under Articles 43 and 44 of the Convention, this Chamber judgment is not final. During the three-month  
period following its delivery, any party may request that the case be referred to the Grand Chamber of the  
Court. If such a request is made, a panel of five judges considers whether the case deserves further  
examination. In that event, the Grand Chamber will hear the case and deliver a final judgment. If the referral  
request is refused, the Chamber judgment will become final on that day.  
Once a judgment becomes final, it is transmitted to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe for  
supervision of its execution. Further information about the execution process can be found here:  
www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/execution  
 
that court were subsequently quashed by way of supervisory review, it being found that  
Mr Dushka should not have been subjected to administrative detention as he was a  
minor.  
Following his release, Mr Dushka hired a lawyer and retracted his statements, alleging  
that he had made his previous confessions under duress.  
He also immediately informed the law-enforcement authorities that he had been  
ill-treated. The ensuing investigation, which lasted three years, was closed and reopened  
on a number of occasions but always ended with the prosecuting authorities refusing to  
bring criminal proceedings due to lack of evidence.  
During the investigation two expert medical examinations were ordered. The first,  
carried out in November 2002, reported abrasions and bruises on different parts of  
Mr Dushka’s body as well as a kidney contusion. The second was carried out in January  
2005 and concluded that the injuries he had sustained were most likely to have been  
caused by blunt objects and that Mr Dushka’s depression and chronic kidney infection  
could be connected to a traumatic experience in November 2002.  
Complaints, procedure and composition of the Court  
Relying in particular on Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) and  
Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the Convention, Mr Dushka alleged that the  
police had ill-treated him in custody in order to make him confess to a robbery and that  
the ensuing investigation into his allegations had been inadequate.  
The application was lodged with the European Court of Human Rights on 26 July 2004.  
Judgment was given by a Chamber of seven, composed as follows:  
Peer Lorenzen (Denmark), President,  
Karel Jungwiert (the Czech Republic),  
Mark Villiger (Liechtenstein),  
Isabelle Berro-Lefèvre (Monaco),  
Mirjana Lazarova Trajkovska (“the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”),  
Ganna Yudkivska (Ukraine),  
Julia Laffranque (Estonia), Judges,  
and also Claudia Westerdiek, Section Registrar.  
Decision of the Court  
Article 3  
Ill-treatment  
The Court found that Mr Dushka's account of how he had sustained his injuries, namely,  
police ill-treatment during interrogation, was sufficiently detailed, and consistent with  
the expert medical reports of November 2002 and January 2005. The Government, on  
the other hand, had failed to provide any coherent and substantiated alternative account  
of the relevant events, in spite of several years of investigations. The Court therefore  
held that the State was responsible for Mr Dushka’s injuries which he had sustained as a  
result of ill-treatment.  
Indeed, regardless of whether the police had resorted to physical violence or not,  
Mr Dushka’s arrest in ambiguous circumstances, as well as his administrative detention,  
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officially declared unlawful by the domestic judicial authorities, aroused a strong  
suspicion that the police had arrested Mr Dushka and placed him in detention as a  
means to break his moral resistance and obtain a confession. The fact that that  
confession had been made in a setting lacking such procedural guarantees as the  
presence of a lawyer, and had then been retracted upon release, also pointed to the  
conclusion that it might not have been given freely.  
The Court found that such practice, especially given Mr Dushka's vulnerable age,  
qualified as inhuman and degrading treatment, in violation of Article 3.  
Investigation  
The Court noted that, although Mr Dushka had promptly informed the authorities of his  
ill-treatment, the investigation had lasted more than three years and had not established  
what had happened to him during his arrest and custody or identified those responsible  
for his injuries.  
Numerous administrative or court orders, stating that the investigation had been  
perfunctory and one-sided, remitted the case for further investigation. However, the  
prosecuting authorities simply responded by repeating the same conclusion (lack of  
evidence) each time for their refusal to bring criminal proceedings. In spite of specific  
instructions issued by the courts and the supervising prosecuting authorities, the  
investigation had therefore not answered Mr Dushka’s allegations, providing for example  
a plausible explanation for his injuries or a substantiated response concerning the  
unlawfulness of his arrest and detention as well as questioning in violation of procedural  
guarantees (the absence of a lawyer or his parents).  
The Court reiterated that there had been a number of other recent cases brought before  
it against Ukraine in which it had found a violation of Article 3 on account of the lack of  
an effective investigation into allegations of ill-treatment. Noting that Mr Dushka’s case  
was similar, it concluded that there had been a further violation of Article 3 concerning  
the  
lack  
of  
an  
effective  
investigation  
into  
Mr  
Dushka’s  
complaint  
of  
ill-treatment while in police custody.  
Given that finding, the Court considered that it was not necessary to examine  
Mr Dushka’s complaint concerning the effectiveness of the investigation under Article 13.  
Article 41 (just satisfaction)  
The Court held that Ukraine was to pay Mr Dushka’s estate 18,000 euros (EUR) in  
respect of non-pecuniary damage and EUR 150 to his mother in respect of costs and  
expenses.  
The judgment is available only in English.  
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The European Court of Human Rights was set up in Strasbourg by the Council of  
Europe Member States in 1959 to deal with alleged violations of the 1950 European  
Convention on Human Rights.  
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