Abstract

This article exposes the disjunction between the progressive rhetoric of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on rehabilitation and the reality for life-sentenced prisoners. It illuminates the tensions between the Court’s jurisprudence on the prisoner’s right to rehabilitation and a nebulous ‘right to security’ of the public that threatens to undermine prisoners’ rights. It is argued that two distinct conceptual frameworks for understanding rehabilitation for life-sentenced prisoners underpin the ECtHR’s jurisprudence: rehabilitation as risk reduction and rehabilitation as redemption. The first is shaped by a preoccupation with identifying and reducing risk factors for offending. The second reflects the idea that offending indicates bad character but that people can atone for their crimes by working hard to change themselves. The article concludes that the ECtHR, by placing the onus on life-sentenced prisoners to demonstrate they have achieved rehabilitation, risks entrenching the trends of popular punitiveness and precautionary penal warehousing that it has sought to oppose.

中文翻译：

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风险降低与赎回：欧洲人权法院判例中对康复权的解释性解释

摘要

本文揭示了欧洲人权法院 (ECtHR) 关于康复的进步言论与无期徒刑囚犯的现实之间的脱节。它阐明了法院关于囚犯康复权的判例与可能损害囚犯权利的模糊的公众“安全权”之间的紧张关系。有人认为，欧洲人权法院的判例有两个不同的概念框架来理解被判无期徒刑的囚犯的康复：康复作为降低风险和康复作为救赎。首先是专注于识别和减少犯罪的风险因素。第二个反映了这样的想法，即冒犯表明品格不好，但人们可以通过努力改变自己来弥补自己的罪行。