Risk Reduction and Redemption: An Interpretive Account of the Right to Rehabilitation in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights

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.