THIRD SECTION
CASE OF TEPLJAKOV v. ESTONIA
(Application no. 10753/21)
 
 
 
 
JUDGMENT
 
STRASBOURG
28 November 2023
 
This judgment is final but it may be subject to editorial revision. In the case of Tepljakov v. Estonia,
The European Court of Human Rights (Third Section), sitting as a Committee composed of:
 Jolien Schukking, President,
 Peeter Roosma,
 Andreas Zünd, judges,
and Olga Chernishova, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to:
the application (no. 10753/21) against the Republic of Estonia lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) on 9 February 2021 by an Estonian national, Mr Jevgeni Tepljakov, born in 1976 (“the applicant”) who was represented by Mr M. Põbo, a lawyer practising in Pärnu;
the decision to give notice of the complaints under Articles 3, 8 and 10 of the Convention concerning conditions of detention, family meetings during detention and access to an online legal database to the Estonian Government (“the Government”), represented by their Agent, Ms M. Kuurberg, Representative of Estonia to the European Court of Human Rights, and subsequently by Mr T. Kolk, her successor in that office, and to declare inadmissible the remainder of the application;
the parties’ observations;
Having deliberated in private on 7 November 2023,
Delivers the following judgment, which was adopted on that date:
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
1. The case concerns conditions of detention in Pärnu Arrest House where the applicant spent several separate periods in pre-trial detention (varying from 6 days to 100 days at a time, 345 days altogether) between August 2016 and December 2018. He spent the remainder of his pre-trial detention in Tallinn Prison. 2. The domestic courts found that the ventilation and access to natural light were insufficient in Pärnu Arrest House; that the toilet was not adequately separated from the rest of the cell (which the applicant sometimes shared with other detainees); that the applicant had no possibility to spend time outdoors as there was no outside yard; that without any fault on the applicant’s part the authorities had limited his meetings with family members to approximately ten minutes at a time; and that the arrest house provided no technical possibilities for detainees to have access to a certain online legal database. 3. Assessing all the above-mentioned shortcomings in conjunction, the domestic courts awarded the applicant 1,500 euros (EUR) in respect of non‑pecuniary damage while the applicant had claimed EUR 3,450 before the Tallinn Court of Appeal. 4. With regard to access to the online legal database, the first-instance court initiated constitutional review proceedings. By a judgment no. 5-19-41 of 18 December 2019 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a part of the section 31(3) of the Regulation no. 21 of the Minister of the Interior on the Internal Rules of the Arrest House (Arestimaja sisekorraeeskiri). Under this provision detainees were authorised to have access to an online database containing legal acts and court judgments “in so far as the arrest house had technical conditions for it.” The Supreme Court observed that the restriction in question interfered with the constitutional right to freely obtain information disseminated for public use. It noted that that above-mentioned clause left it entirely up to each arrest house whether to provide access to the legal database in question or not. However, section 311 of the Imprisonment Act (as in force at the relevant time) provided that remand prisoners had the right to access that legal database. The Supreme Court found that the Imprisonment Act did not authorise the minister to set any further restrictions to such access. The impugned restriction was thus not based on law and was accordingly unconstitutional. 5. The applicant invokes complaints about the physical conditions of detention in Pärnu Arrest House, about the meetings with family members and a lack access to the online legal database.

Article of the Convention at issue: Article 3
Outcome: violation