CEDH · CASELAW;CLIN;ENG — 17 décembre 2009

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Azerbaijan - 4762/05 Judgment 17.12.2009 [Section I] Article 2 Positive obligations Suicide during eviction from home by the authorities: no violation   Article 2-1 Effective investigation Inadequate investigation into suicide committed during eviction from home by the authorities: violation   Facts – The applicant and his family were internally displaced persons who lived in a State-owned hostel. In 2003 they discovered three abandoned rooms owned by the local army-recruitment office and decided to move in. In March 2004 a group of local-authority representatives and police officers came to the property to evict them. They did not have a court order. The police officers started carrying out the furniture and loading it onto a lorry. The applicant’s wife, visibly distressed by the arrival of the authorities, threatened to set fire to herself. Shortly afterwards she poured kerosene over herself and set it alight. She was taken to hospital with serious burns and died from complications a few days later. Before the European Court the applicant claimed that the police had not taken his wife’s threat seriously and that one of the local-authority representatives had mockingly encouraged her to carry out her threat. The Government denied the accusations, claiming that at least one of the police officers had tried to help the applicant’s wife put out the fire with a blanket. Following the incident, a preliminary inquiry was carried out into the death but in May 2004 the investigator decided not to start criminal proceedings because the inquiry had not established any responsibility on the part of State officials. At the insistence of the applicant, who claimed that the authorities had incited his wife to commit suicide, criminal proceedings were eventually brought in 2005. A number of witnesses were questioned including the applicant’s family and officials who had been present at the scene. The investigation was suspended on several occasions for failure to identify the person who had allegedly incited the applicant’s wife to commit suicide. It was finally terminated in September 2008. Law – Article 2: (a)   Substantive aspect – It was undisputed that the applicant’s wife had died as a result of suicide rather than as result of the use of force. However, it was necessary to establish the degree of control the authorities had exercised over the events in question and whether the circumstances of the case as a whole had given rise to positive obligations on the part of the State agents present at the scene to protect the life of the applicant’s wife. Irrespective of the lawfulness of their action, by conducting the operation to evict the applicant’s family, the authorities could not be considered to have intentionally put the life of the applicant’s wife at risk or otherwise caused her to commit suicide. Nor could they have anticipated that the applicant’s wife would set herself on fire, since such conduct was not a reasonable or predictable reaction in the context of an attempted eviction from an illegally occupied dwelling. Consequently, the authorities’ decision to evict the applicant’s family from the dwelling did not, in itself, engage the State’s responsibility under Article   2 and there had been insufficient evidence to show that any of the State agents had incited the applicant’s wife to commit suicide. However, it was also necessary to establish whether the authorities, once confronted with the unexpected situation during the eviction procedure, ought to have become aware that the applicant’s wife posed a real and immediate risk of suicide and, if so, whether they did all that could reasonably have been expected of them to avert that risk. If the State agents had become aware of such a threat sufficiently in advance, a positive obligation would have arisen under Article   2 requiring them to prevent it from materialising by all reasonable and feasible means. In the applicant’s case, given the diverging account of the facts presented by the parties, it had been impossible for the Court to establish with certainty whether the State agents had become aware of the danger in time to prevent the fire or extinguish it as soon as possible. Even though some doubts remained whether responsibility for the death lay at least in part with the authorities, the Court considered them insufficient to establish conclusively that the authorities had acted in a manner incompatible with their positive obligations to guarantee the right to life. Conclusion : no violation (five votes to two). (b)     Procedural aspect – The investigation into the death of the applicant’s wife was inadequate as it had not covered all the issues relevant to the assessment of the State’s responsibility for the incident. In particular, the investigation had been limited to the question whether the State agents had incited the applicant’s wife to commit suicide, while it had never examined whether they had done everything necessary to prevent her death or to minimise her injuries. Moreover, the investigation had been characterised by numerous other shortcomings. Firstly, the authorities had failed to take immediate action or to question the victim before she died. They had not attempted to reconstruct the sequence and duration of the events or to address the discrepancies in the witness statements. Moreover, the domestic investigation had lasted more than four years, having been adjourned and resumed a number of times without any evident progress in its effectiveness and without any substantive improvement in the adequacy of the measures taken. Lastly, by granting the applicant the status of a victim in the criminal proceedings only in June 2006, the authorities had denied him the possibility of effectively intervening in the investigation up to that point. Conclusion : violation (unanimously). Article 41: EUR   20,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage.   © Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court. Click here for the Case-Law Information Notes