This report, prepared by the European Prison Litigation Network jointly with the Center for European and Constitutional Law (Greece), Forum Penal – Associação de Advogados Penalistas (Portugal), and the Human Rights Center ZMINA (Ukraine) presents the findings of a study conducted in 2024 and 2025 to identify the legal, procedural and structural barriers that hinder the enforcement of rights in prisons – a space where rights are both most urgently required and most likely to remain theoretical.
It forms part of a collective effort within our network to analyse the practical impacts of prison reforms on prisoners’ rights and to remove barriers to the effective enforcement of rights in prison. It also complements and updates the findings of a previous study conducted between 2017 and 2019 in nine European countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria).
This study was carried out within the framework of the project “DIGNITY: Bridging Views for a Rights-Based Approach to Pre-Trial Detention”, funded by the European Union
Context and Objectives
While the requirement of the right to an effective remedy has become a central parameter in the assessment of national penitentiary systems by Council of Europe institutions, far less attention has been paid to the concrete means by which detainees can formulate complaints against the prison administration and bring them before a judicial authority.
In other words, through what legal processes can violations of fundamental rights—whether resulting from arbitrary security or disciplinary measures, deplorable material conditions of detention, lack of medical care, or deliberate ill-treatment—be transformed into legally cognisable claims capable of being declared admissible by a court and argued in a manner that can persuade a judge? In light of these determinants, what is the reality of detainees’ access to a court in practice?
Building on an earlier study coordinated by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the European Prison Litigation Network, the report investigates the legal, procedural, and structural barriers that detainees, particularly those held on remand, face in challenging violations of their fundamental rights in detention, and the extent to which existing legal frameworks, remedies, and support mechanisms render such litigation effective in practice.
Focusing on Greece, Portugal, and Ukraine, the study situates national experiences within broader international and regional standards, with a view to advancing both European and global protections for one of the most vulnerable groups in the criminal justice system.
The three countries have in common the fact that they have been required to address structural problems in their prison systems and to establish effective remedies in this respect (see Nisiotis v. Greece, no. 34704/08, 10 February 2011; Petrescu v. Portugal, no. 23190/17, 3 December 2019; Sukachov v. Ukraine, no. 14057/17, 30 January 2020). The case of Ukraine is however more resistant to comparison, given that its penitentiary and judicial systems are forced to operate in a war context. As the report shows, the process of accession of Ukraine to the European Union, which has become a key political issue, implies the implementation of harmonisation policies, particularly in the judicial and penitentiary fields.
By linking international standards, national realities, and empirical evidence, the study seeks to advance both understanding and policy reform. The report is intended as a resource for legal practitioners, policymakers, and civil society actors working to improve the protection of detainees’ rights in Europe and beyond.
Main findings
Despite their different legal traditions and socio-political contexts—and despite, in Ukraine’s case, the extreme situation of war that threatens the very survival of the country and makes its experience difficult to compare in conventional terms—all three countries face a number of common challenges with regard to prisoners’ access to law and access to the courts.
Across these systems, prisoners’ capacity to invoke and enforce their rights is constrained by structural, procedural, and financial barriers that limit access to effective remedies.
In all three countries, our partners found that prisoners have limited access to legal information. The systems designed to inform prisoners of their rights remain fragmented, outdated, and largely ineffective in practice. Consequently, the information reaching prisoners often remains limited, is provided predominantly in the national language and tends to focus on practical routines rather than rights and remedies. Furthermore, the proliferation of lower-level regulatory texts, such as circulars and administrative memos, that directly shape prisoners’ daily lives but are rarely published or made accessible creates a form of opaque governance that fosters arbitrariness and undermines legal certainty.
While the right to legal assistance is recognised for pre-trial detainees in the countries studied, our partners found that there is little coordinated provision of it when it comes to matters beyond the criminal trial and for enforcing their rights in detention, leaving prisoners to navigate complex administrative and judicial procedures on their own—an effectively insurmountable task given the isolation, limited information, and dependency that define imprisonment.
Access to legal assistance in detention is not simply a matter of fairness but a structural precondition for the enforceability of rights. Without it, the overlapping barriers within the prison environment make it difficult, and in many cases impossible, for prisoners to understand what remedies exist, meet procedural deadlines, or secure the evidence required to substantiate complaints. Within this context, only a very small minority are able to navigate litigation channels unaided. Simplified procedures cannot compensate for the interpretative, evidentiary, and protective functions that only a lawyer can provide. This exclusion not only weakens individual access to justice but also reinforces a cyclical marginalisation of prison issues within the legal system.
Across Portugal, Greece, and Ukraine, access to legal aid is formally recognised as a right for persons deprived of liberty, yet our partners found that its practical application in detention-related matters remains extremely limited, due to a combination of restrictive interpretations of the scope of legal aid and procedural ambiguities. Furthermore, while low remuneration and delayed payments for legal aid lawyers make this area of practice difficult to sustain, the lack of institutional involvement by Bar Associations in prison litigation identified by our partners further disincentivises engagement. As a result, prison law remains a peripheral and underdeveloped area of practice, perpetuating the invisibility of detainees’ rights violations and the absence of consistent litigation capable of enforcing prisoners’ rights as well as addressing and exposing torture and ill-treatment within detention.
In Greece and Portugal, the lack of an organised network of lawyers dedicated to prison strategic litigation has not been filled by civil society. NGOs and university legal clinics active in prisons focus almost exclusively on psychosocial support, education, or reintegration, rather than on providing sustained legal representation. In Ukraine, civil society organisations play a more active role in assisting detainees and monitoring detention conditions, but their efforts are constrained by limited funding, logistical constraints linked to the war, and the immense task of dealing with war crimes in terms of documentation and victim support, which involves redeploying a large part of their resources.
Overall, the findings from all three countries underscore that meaningful access to justice for prisoners cannot depend on the mere existence of rights recognition on paper or simplified complaint mechanisms, but requires the practical infrastructure, professional expertise, and political will necessary to make those rights tangible, effective, and enforceable in practice.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
This study was carried out within the framework of the project “DIGNITY: Bridging Views for a Rights-Based Approach to Pre-Trial Detention”, funded by the European Union.
Funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.