STRASBOURG, France (CN) — Prison conditions in Malta during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic were not inhumane, Europe’s top rights court ruled Tuesday.
The European Court of Human Rights rejected the allegations of Maltese businessman Yorgen Fenech that his prison conditions were unhealthy or put him at a higher risk of contracting coronavirus.
Fenech has been in pretrial detention at the Corradino Correctional Facility in Paolo, a town in the southeastern part of Malta’s main island, since his 2019 arrest. He is suspected of masterminding the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist looking into corruption. At the time of her assassination by a car bomb near her home in 2017, Caruana Galizia was looking into one of Fenech’s business deals.
The 40-year-old Fenech argued before the Strasbourg-based court that a medical condition — he only has one kidney — placed him at a higher risk for Covid-19 and that he should have been better protected against the virus. He filed his application in May 2020, when, as the court pointed out in its ruling, little was known about the virus. Accommodations were made in the prison to protect residents, including quarantining prisoners who were infected and thoroughly cleaning areas where they may have been.
Fenech also argued that the very regulations aimed at protecting the prison population were emotionally and psychologically damaging. He, like all prisoners, was restricted from access to the gym, church and visitors. Corradino Correctional Facility did undergo a lockdown during the pandemic, all of Malta did as well. “The limitations complained of occurred within a very specific context, namely during a public health emergency … and were put in place in view of significant health considerations, not only on the applicant but on society at large,” the court wrote Tuesday.
Three other men were arrested in the months after Caruana Galizia’s murder, one of whom negotiated a pardon in exchange for testifying against his co-conspirators. The day after that deal was announced, Fenech was caught by the military attempting to flee the country on his private yacht.
The court has heard a number of cases involving Covid-19 measures since the start of the pandemic and has broadly upheld government measures used to combat the virus. In November 2020, it rejected a case from a French citizen who accused Paris of inadequately handling the crisis. Last year, it rejected another French claim, this time from someone who argued the requirement to show proof of vaccination was discrimination.
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