Our work

While the criminal justice field has become a privileged terrain for challenging the role of judges, particularly the authority and legitimacy of supranational courts, ensuring prisoners’ access to justice requires a greater mobilisation for the defence of the very principle of judicial protection of fundamental rights in prison and the core principles of criminal law.

EPLN works at exposing the rule of law implications of penal populism and advocates for the integration of criminal justice issues into European rule of law monitoring frameworks. This includes scrutiny of measures adopted for purely political purposes that reduce fundamental rights in prison and restrict prisoners’ access to courts, including access to a lawyer and the scope of judicial oversight over prison administrations. This major concern was subject of a joint call by prisoners’ rights defenders and bar associations during the European Prisoners’ Rights Days organised by EPLN in 2025.

EPLN also alerts international bodies on the consequences of the punitive turn observed across the continent. Particular attention is drawn to the decisive role played by long prison sentences in driving prison overcrowding — an issue that is often overlooked in favour of politically less sensitive approaches that focus primarily on prison inflows. EPLN has successfully raised these concerns with the Committee of Ministers in various contexts, including in Portugal, Moldova and Ukraine, in collaboration with its national partners: Forum Penal, Promo-LEX and Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine, respectively.

People suffering from chronic illnesses, infectious diseases and mental health disorders are overrepresented in detention, while prison healthcare systems across Europe continue to face structural shortcomings. EPLN advocates for the integration of prison healthcare into national public health systems and for the independence of healthcare professionals in detention. Such independence is essential not only to ensure the quality and continuity of care, but also to reduce the risk of ill-treatment in detention.

In the landmark judgment Cosovan v. the Republic of Moldova (2022), achieved by Promo-LEX with the support of EPLN, the ECtHR recognised the independence of medical professionals as a key condition for effective healthcare in prison. Building on this judgment, EPLN successfully advocated before the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe for stronger supervision of prison healthcare reforms in Moldova and Ukraine, leading to the requirement that prison healthcare be placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health. Both governments endorsed this reform in 2025, with implementation planned for 2027.

In a pending case against Greece, EPLN and its Greek partner, the Centre for European and Constitutional Law, called on the ECtHR in 2024 to  reaffirm the principle of equivalence of care, requiring that healthcare provided in prison be equivalent to that available in the community.

EPLN also advocates for medical release mechanisms for seriously ill prisoners and for improved access to harm reduction services in detention. Given the high prevalence of HIV in prisons, largely linked to unsafe injection drug use, ensuring access to harm reduction services in full respect of confidentiality remains a critical public health issue. EPLN is currently pursuing litigation concerning the lack of access to methadone treatment in Ukrainian prisons and regularly raises this issue before the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. These efforts have contributed to recent improvements in access to opioid substitution therapy in Ukraine’s prison system.

EPLN works to combat torture and ill-treatment in detention, particularly in countries where such practices remain widespread. The network supports its members in documenting cases of torture, assisting victims and bringing cases before national and international courts.

This support to field work is especially crucial in several post-Soviet countries, where prison systems still bear the legacy of violent administrative practices inherited from the Gulag era. Maintaining hotlines for prisoners and their relatives, conducting regular prison visits, and cooperating with lawyers are essential to ensure that acts of torture are properly documented and brought to justice. In 2024 and 2025 alone, EPLN supported its member organisations in the region in carrying out 28 prison visits and more than 200 consultations with victims or their relatives.

EPLN also campaigns to combat impunity for perpetrators of torture. In Ukraine, the persistent documentation work carried out by EPLN’s members, Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, combined with strategic litigation at the domestic level, has led to significant progress. This includes the closure of Penal Colony No. 45 after evidence of systematic beatings was uncovered, as well as the prosecution of members of the management of Colonies No. 16, No. 45 and No. 77.

EPLN and its members also regularly bring cases of torture and ill-treatment before the ECtHR, advocating for stronger mechanisms to ensure accountability and prevention of future abuses. EPLN is notably defending in a pending case before the ECtHR a Ukrainian prisoner victim of reprisals because of him communicating with the CPT.

In Russia, analyses patterns of torture and the role of the prison system as a matrix of institutional violence in Russia. EPLN promotes a transitional justice approach, aimed in particular at establishing guarantees of non-repetition.

Despite the growing emphasis placed on the social reintegration of prisoners in international standards, sentence adjustment procedures are frequently still largely under the control of prison administrations, with prisoners having limited opportunities to present their case effectively.

To address this, EPLN conducted a joint project with its members and partners in seven countries (Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Italy) to identify the main obstacles preventing prisoners from accessing sentence adjustments. The findings will inform future litigation and advocacy strategies at the European level, with the aim of strengthening adversarial guarantees and procedural safeguards for prisoners.

EPLN’s work also addresses the growing use of algorithmic tools in sentencing procedures, which raises concerns about due process, the protection of personal data, and the risk of discrimination. To assess these risks, EPLN conducted a comparative study in several countries and launched pre-litigation research in Ukraine into the so-called ‘Cassandra’ risk-assessment system.

Finally, EPLN is working to remove the barriers that life-sentenced prisoners face in accessing conditional release through litigation before the ECtHR and submissions to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. In 2021, EPLN and its partner, the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, successfully challenged the regime prohibiting life-sentenced prisoners from communicating with prisoners held in other cells.

The EU accession process, marked by the granting of candidate status to Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova in 2022, created a unique opportunity to elevate prison reform to the level of a genuine political priority capable of addressing the structural causes of prison problems.

In both countries, our network draws on the considerable expertise and credibility of its national member organisations in the fields of criminal justice and prisons. EPLN also builds on a long-standing cooperation with the European Union, having been one of the key actors in the international working group involved in the preparation of Ukraine’s penitentiary reform strategy up to 2026.

EPLN has contributed to ensure that prison issues are included among the topics monitored by the European Commission in the accession process, as reflected in the Commission’s annual enlargement reports. The conclusions reached within this framework, including the identification of structural shortcomings in prison oversight and accountability mechanisms, have helped to shape the current reform agenda in both countries.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, EPLN has stood alongside its Ukrainian members to document torture committed against prisoners, raise public awareness and support victims in legal proceedings and rehabilitation. EPLN has also engaged with the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office to improve the coordination and effectiveness of investigations into crimes.

Together with its partners, EPLN obtained from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention a decision recognising as arbitrary detention the deportation in November 2022 of around 1,800 Ukrainian prisoners to Russia.

EPLN has also supported Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine in assisting victims in their repatriation to Ukraine. Since 2023, more than 500 released prisoners deported to Russia have returned to Ukrainian government-controlled territory. This work combines logistical and humanitarian assistance with legal action before national bodies and the ECtHR, as well as continuous advocacy calling on international organisations to fulfil their humanitarian mandate toward this group of victims of war crimes. It also includes advocacy aimed at reopening a humanitarian corridor for the return of deported prisoners. These efforts are reinforced through EPLN’s involvement in the international campaign “People First”, which advocates for the release of civilians and other captives held as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

At the same time, EPLN and Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine use the collected evidence of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in domestic proceedings and communications submitted to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine and other UN Special Procedures. Individual complaints have also been lodged with the UN Human Rights Committee.

Finally, EPLN has supported the documentation and analytical work carried out by Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group on the preventive measures adopted by Ukrainian authorities in response to Russian bombardments of prison facilities. This work includes in particular an analysis of the shelling of Penal Colony No. 99 in July 2025, which resulted in the death of 17 prisoners.