Hassan v. The United Kingdom (Eur. Ct. H.R.)

Abstract

On September 16, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) gave its judgment in the case of Hassan v. United Kingdom.This is the Court’s first explicit engagement with the co-applicability of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in relation to detention in international armed conflicts. The judgment is significant for its rejection of the government’s argument that international humanitarian law operates as lex specialis to displace international human rights law entirely during the “active hostilities phase of an international armed conflict.” It is also noteworthy for the majority’s ruling that provisions on detention of prisoners of war and the internment of protected persons in the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949 could be read into Article 5 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights (the European Convention), creating a new ground for detention under Article 5(1) in international armed conflicts and modifying the procedural guarantees in Article 5(4).