Romani children abused by Slovak Police awarded EUR 20,000 each in compensation

According to the ECtHR, the domestic courts took a disproportionately long time to review the case. Moreover, the domestic courts did not sufficiently review the allegations of humiliating treatment by the police and did not sufficiently review the racial motivation claimed in the indictment.

The ECtHR also found that the Constitutional Court, to which the plaintiffs turned more than once, had been ineffective in its proceedings. “The European Court for Human Rights has finally brought these victims justice. This is an exceptionally important judgment that sends a clear signal to the Slovak courts that when proceedings are conducted in this way, they cannot be considered effective. The European Court also highlighted the work of the detectives and prosecutors, who responded quickly to the case, investigated it sufficiently and brought it to court,” attorney for the victims Vanda Durbáková said.

“The fact is that this is one of a very few cases of police brutality to even make it before the courts in Slovakia. Despite that, the case was not effectively investigated and the identity of the perpetrators was never ascertained so as to hold them accountable. This case illustrates the obstacles faced by victims in accessing justice in cases of police brutality in Slovakia. It is the duty of state institutions to eliminate those obstacles,” said Durbáková.

“I am happy for everybody who was at the police station then and had to live through this. I am glad the European Court compensated us. I think it’s important to stand up to police brutality, although doing so was hard on our nerves and took a lot of patience. The Slovak courts disappointed me greatly,” said one of the plaintiffs, who is an adult by now with a son of his own.

“I hope this judgment contributes to this never happening again in Slovakia,” the plaintiff said. The incident occurred in March 2009, when several police officers arrested six Romani boys between the ages of 11 and 15 and brought them to the Košice-Jih police station.

The boys testified that they had been forced to strip, to slap each other, and to kiss each other, and that the officers had kicked them and verbally insulted them (including for their Romani origins) in front of dogs which were barking at them without muzzles on and which even bit them. Some of this behavior was recorded with a mobile phone and the edited audiovisual footage was then sent to the media and published online.

After the video was posted by the ROMEA organization, YouTube deleted it because of its brutality. Shortly after the incident, the Interior Ministry’s Audit and Inspection Services section initiated a criminal investigation that resulted in charges against 10 officers of abusing the powers of a public official and extortion specifically motivated by ethnic hatred, and later in the filing of an indictment by the Prosecutor-General of the Slovak Republic.

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Even after extensive evidence was provided, the Košice II District Court repeatedly acquitted the police officers. Its judgments were twice overturned by the Regional Court in Košice.

Among other matters, the appeals venue reproached the District Court for not allowing the introduction of evidence, including not allowing the video recording to be played that partially captured the incident because the District Court did not consider it lawful evidence. After its decision was overturned a second time, the District Court entered the recording into evidence, but only at the direct instruction of the appeals court.

Subsequently, in December 2019, the District Court acquitted the defendants for a third time. That decision took effect after the Regional Court, in December 2020, rejected the prosecutor’s appeal of that third acquittal.

On 8 January 2019, the plaintiffs had filed a Constitutional Court complaint against the second acquittal, arguing that it violated their rights under the European Convention and the Slovak Constitution, complaining especially about the length of the proceedings overall (taking 10 years since the incident) and asserting that they had faced humiliating treatment that had not been reviewed sufficiently by the courts. On 23 May 2019, the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic rejected that complaint as unjustified.

“On 25 March 2021, the plaintiffs turned to the Constitutional Court again. That second constitutional complaint targeted both the District and the Regional Courts and confronted those general venues with the development and outcome of the proceedings before them, raising similar objections to the third acquittal as had been raised about the second acquittal in 2019, and asked the Constitutional Court to overturn the Regional Court verdict of 11 December 2020 and return the matter to that court for another proceedings,” the Center for Human and Civil Rights said in its press release.

In December 2019, the victims had also complained to the ECtHR. They argued that their rights guaranteed by the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms had been violated, especially their right to protection from cruel and inhuman treatment, which involves the obligation of domestic courts to make decisions within an appropriate timeframe and conduct effective investigations in such cases, not just through the police, but also through the courts themselves.

The victims also demanded the determination that the domestic court procedure, especially that of the Košice II District Court, had violated their right to access effective legal remedy and their right to protection from discrimination in association with their cases. They argued that institutional racism had also influenced the courts’ decisions and evaluation of the evidence.

“On 7 February 2021, the ECtHR essentially agreed with the victims’ complaint. The court decided that the relevant state bodies violated both their right to protection from police brutality and their right to an effective investigation of that brutality, including the investigation of a possible racial motivation. By doing so, they violated their guaranteed right to protection from inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under Article 3 of the Convention in both its material and procedural parts. They also violated their right to protection from discrimination when exercising their guaranteed rights and freedoms under Article 14 in its procedural part because they did not sufficiently investigate the possible racial motivation of the violence committed against the victims,” the Center states.

The ECtHR emphasized the fact that the reaction of both the police detectives and the supervising prosecutor to the incident was fast and led to charges being filed. The court also pointed out that the verdict of the Košice II District Court had been overturned twice for procedural deficiencies, including the fact that the District Court had failed to respect the legal opinion of the appeals court and had refused to introduce as evidence the playing of the audiovisual recording of the incident during trial.

That refusal led to the proceedings becoming significantly protracted. The ECtHR also found that an important aspect of the defendants being acquitted had been discrepancies between the testimonies of the plaintiffs during the preliminary proceedings and their testimonies during the trial, as well as discrepancies between the testimonies of the individual plaintiffs.

According to the ECtHR, however, the protracted proceedings contributed to these discrepancies. “The court specifically indicated that in this case, the acquittal verdict of the first-instance court was ultimately upheld by the appeals court for more than 11 years and eight months after the incident occurred in March 2009. The ECtHR found, therefore, that deficiencies in the speed of investigating this incident were of such a scope that they made the investigation absolutely ineffective,” reads the press release, which news server Romea.cz has seen.