Abstract
The European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that domestic abuse can violate the European Convention on Human Rights, however the way in which this issue has been conceptualised by the Court has evolved in terms of which articles of the Convention have been held to have been breached in such cases. The approach taken by the Court was initially somewhat incoherent regarding the use of article 3 (the right to be free from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment) and article 8 (the right to respect for private and family life). Nevertheless since the case of Valiuliene v. Lithuania (app. no. 22234/07, 26 March 2013) there has been a substantially greater use of article 3 in such cases. The Court’s judgments in Tunikova and Others v. Russia (app nos. 55974/16, 53118/17, 27484/18, 28011/19, 14 December 2021) and Volodina v Russia (app no. 41261/17, 9 July 2019) again raise issues regarding the conceptualisation of domestic abuse, as will be discussed in this paper. In both of these cases, the question arose of whether domestic abuse should be specifically conceptualised as falling within the ‘torture’ limb of article 3. Both Tunikova and Volodina serve to illustrate the way in which the Court’s jurisprudence on this issue has evolved, from a reliance primarily on article 8 to a situation whereby the use of article 3 is commonplace and the debate has become whether domestic abuse should be expressly conceptualised as torture.
Presenters
Ronagh McQuiggSenior Lecturer, School of Law, Queen's University, Belfast, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Domestic abuse, Human rights, Torture, European Court of Human Rights
