Publicaties

Protecting the dignity and human rights of prisoners poses difficult challenges. Degradation is a hallmark of all punishment and especially of imprisonment. Prisons as total institutions entail distinctive power relations between staff and inmates that increase risks of violations of prisoners’ dignity. Protection of human dignity is complicated by difficulties in defining the term: the sense of personal dignity experienced subjectively by the ...

The power to punish is traditionally seen as an essential prerogative of the national state. Over the last three decades, judicial and standard setting bodies of the Council of Europe (CoE) have sought increasingly, at a regional level, to monitor and control the power of European States to punish. In parallel, the European Union (EU) has become an increasingly important penal actor, fostering a common approach to transnational forms of ...