Focus on Article 5 ECHR (Parishil Patel, September 2005)

Articles23rd November 2005

This article was originally published in JR Magazine in September 2005.

“Article 5 of the ECHR protects the liberty and security of the person.  The underlying aim of Article 5 is to ensure that no one is deprived of this liberty arbitrarily.  There are three aspects to the rights under Article 5.  First, there is an exhaustive list of circumstances in which a person can be lawfully deprived of his liberty (paragraphs (1)(a) to (f)).  Second, there is a list of procedural safeguards to be met accompanying those permissible grounds on which a person can be deprived of his liberty.  Third, a person who is unlawfully deprived of his liberty has an enforceable right to compensation for that deprivation.  An exhaustive examination of all those issues is beyond the scope of this article; it concentrates on some of the areas which the English Courts have focused since the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998…”