A. AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
55
Each applicant’s detention depended on his individual circumstances
continuing to justify it, including the degree of threat to national security
which he represented and the possibility to deport him to a safe country, and
was subject to review every six months by SIAC. Each applicant was
informed of the reason for the suspicion against him and given as much of
the underlying evidence as possible and provided with as fair a procedure as
possible to challenge the grounds for his detention. Moreover, SIAC was
able to grant bail if necessary. The applicants were not, therefore, detained
without hope of release: on the contrary there was the opportunity to apply
for release together with mandatory review by the court to ensure that
detention remained both lawful and proportionate in all the circumstances. It
also remained open to the applicants to leave the United Kingdom, as the
second and fourth applicants chose to do.
121. The applicants were judged to pose a serious threat to national
security and were accordingly held in high security conditions, which were
not inhuman or degrading. Each was provided with appropriate treatment
for his physical and mental health problems and the individual
circumstances of each applicant, including his mental health, were taken
into account in determining where he should be held and whether he should
be released on bail. A Special Unit was created at Woodhill Prison of which
the applicants refused to make use (see paragraph 71 above).
122. To the extent that the applicants relied on their individual
conditions of detention and their personal circumstances, they had not
exhausted domestic remedies because they had not made any attempt to
bring the necessary challenges. Any specific complaint about the conditions
of detention could have been the subject of separate legal challenge. The
prison authorities were subject to the requirements of the 1998 Act (see
paragraph 94 above) and had an obligation under section 6(1) to act
compatibly with the Article 3 rights of the applicants in their custody. In so
far as the applicants’ complaints under Article 3 were based on the
indeterminate nature of their detention, this was provided for by primary
legislation (Part 4 of the 2001 Act), and Article 13 did not import the right
to challenge in a domestic court a deliberate choice expressed by the
legislature.
B. The Court’s assessment
1. Admissibility
123. The Court observes that the second applicant was placed in
detention under Part 4 of the 2001 Act on 19 December 2001 and that he
was released on 22 December 2001, following his decision voluntarily to
return to Morocco (see paragraph 35 above). Since he was, therefore,
detained for only a few days and since there is no evidence that during that
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