The Constitutional Court received an application seeking a review of the constitutionality of certain provisions of the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code and the Penal Enforcement Code regulating the crediting of time spent in pre-trial detention towards a sentence, the conditions for parole and the assessment of a convicted person's conduct.
The application followed a court's refusal to grant parole to the applicant, who was serving a custodial sentence. In the applicant's view, when deciding on parole, the court had failed to give due consideration to his conduct during the period of pre-trial detention before the judgment became final, even though this period is credited towards the sentence. The applicant argued that this approach violated the principle of equality before the law and the courts.
The Constitutional Court noted that parole is an institution of criminal law, the conditions and procedure for its application being established by law. Serving the legally prescribed portion of a sentence is a necessary, but not the only, condition for release. In deciding whether to grant parole, a court assesses the convicted person's conduct during the period of serving the sentence and the extent to which they have been rehabilitated.
The Court emphasised that pre-trial detention before a judgment becomes final and the serving of a sentence have different legal implications. In the former case, the presumption of innocence applies, while the conditions of detention do not provide for rehabilitative measures to the same extent as those prescribed for the enforcement of a criminal sentence. Therefore, crediting time spent in pre-trial detention towards a sentence does not mean that the legal regimes governing these periods are identical.
At the same time, the penal enforcement legislation does not preclude the possibility of taking into account information about a person's conduct during pre-trial detention when considering an application for parole.
The Constitutional Court also established that several of the contested provisions had not been applied by the courts when considering the applicant's application for parole. Meanwhile, the application of a contested provision in a specific case is a mandatory admissibility requirement for an individual's application to the Constitutional Court.
In its decision, the Court further explained that the applicant's arguments concerning the assessment of his conduct and the correctness of the application of legislation by courts of general jurisdiction relate to the examination of a specific case and fall outside the Constitutional Court's jurisdiction.
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