Jevtović v. Serbia (Application no. 29896/14)

A selection of key paragraphs can be found below the judgment.

85. (…) With respect to the incident of 24 December 2011, the Court also sees no reason, in view of the known facts of the case, to disagree with the Constitutional Court’s finding of a procedural breach of Article 3, particularly in view of: (i) the notable and unjustifiable lapse of time between some of the investigative steps taken (see, for example, paragraphs 38 and 39 above); (ii) the overall duration of the investigation in question, which started on 14 March 2012 at the latest (see paragraph 25 above) and was still pending as of 4 July 2016 (see paragraph 44 above), having thus lasted, by that time, for a period of some four years and three months in all; (iii) the unnecessarily repetitive nature of some of the those steps (see paragraphs 23-34 and 38-44 above); (iv) the failure by the relevant authorities to attempt to carry out an exercise to allow the applicant to identify the prison guards despite the applicant’s repeated and ostensibly reasonable proposals in that connection (see paragraphs 30, 38, 41 and 43 above); and (v) the lack of transparency in terms of where, when and why video footage may or may not have been available (see and compare the availability of video footage referred to in paragraphs 23 and 28 above). It is lastly the case that the domestic authorities had thus also failed to conduct an effective and meaningful investigation even after the adoption of the Constitutional Court’s decision of 10 July 2013 (see paragraphs 38-44 above).