Dignity and the Deprivation of Liberty

Objective

Dignity is a fundamental European value. A concept with a long history of debate in philosophy, theology, law, and human rights, the precise contours of what it requires remain contested. Dignity is an animating value of the European Convention on Human Rights, but has a particular connection to Article 3 and its prohibition on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. The deprivation of liberty is recognised as a setting where dignity – however defined – is under significant threat. DOLI will provide a novel analysis of what dignity is by engaging in the first empirical assessment of what people deprived of their liberty consider it to mean, what matters most in terms of its protection, and the experience of its violation. DOLI will transform the scholarship on dignity by providing a new empirical assessment of what it means, when it is promoted, and when it is violated. Responding to the increasing awareness in international human rights instruments and scholarship that liberty can be deprived in non-traditional settings such as care homes, DOLI will be the first examination of the experience of and threats to dignity across three forms of detention: prisons; psychiatric hospitals; and care homes for older people in three European countries. While Article 3 is often used in cases relating to imprisonment, it has had much less application in non-prison environments. DOLI will provide a step change in our understanding of the lived experience of dignity in the deprivation of liberty. Drawing on law and human rights, sociology, philosophy and health studies, DOLI will deploy a novel blend of legal analysis, qualitative and quantitative approaches, grounded in human-rights based methods, to create new frameworks for understanding dignity and Article 3 in the deprivation of liberty, new measures to assess it protection, and a new empirical basis for legal norms and judicial decision-making on this vital concept in the protection of human rights in Europe.