In 2024, EPLN and its partners launched a study aimed at analysing sentence adjustment mechanisms in seven European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine), and the consequences, from the point of view of national law, of the weakness of the intervention of European law in this area.
We are publishing today a first overview of the systems of sentence adjustment available in the countries : the legal frameworks, the actors involved, the measures available, the eligibility criteria and the procedural rights of prisoners in the process. This report also draws some preliminary findings on the barriers to prisoners’ access to sentence adjustments.
The study will be completed in 2025 through field research and a further examination of the impact of risk-based rationales and assessment tools on prisoners’ access to sentence adjustment. It will as well highlight areas where greater European harmonisation is needed to strengthen prisoners’ rights.
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At the European level, sentence enforcement law is characterised by a paradoxical situation. While the soft law of the Council of Europe reflects a strong consensus on the primacy of the objective of reintegration and the need to give a central place to the adjustment of sentences, the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights remains reluctant to formulate obligations for States in this area.
At the national level, there is a trend towards the judicialisation of sentencing mechanisms. Measures that were previously the sole responsibility of the executive authorities have been transferred to the courts, either wholly or by way of appeal. Despite the growing importance of penological work in the post-sentence field, this convergence of national laws has received little attention from a European perspective.
The aim of this study is to assess the degree of harmonisation of national laws in this area, which is dominated by soft law instruments, and to evaluate the impact of the judicialisation of sentence adjustment mechanisms on prisoners’ access to these mechanisms.
A central hypothesis that emerges at this stage of the study is that the judicialisation of sentence adjustment mechanisms has not in itself led to improved access to sentence adjustment for prisoners. Across the countries studied, there has been no consistent upward trend in sentence adjustments; instead, a sharp but temporary increase occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by crisis management efforts, followed by a general decline outside this period.
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