Introduction

This chapter examines how the post-prison suicide investigations operate over considerable timescales and explores their legal basis. Prison suicides, along with all deaths in compulsory state detention that are unexplained or related to violence and self-harm will automatically engage Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights (Skelton and Williams, 2016). Article 2 protects the right to life and was enacted in the UK by the Human Rights Act 1998 which ‘significantly illuminated and extended the … State's obligation to take active steps to prevent suicide and self-harm in custody, to protect prisoners from life-threatening assaults, and to investigate those deaths in custody which raise arguable violations of the right to life’ (Owen and Macdonald, 2015: 120‒121). Article 2 consists of three broad obligations:

• • The positive obligation: the systemic and operational duty to take appropriate steps to protect life. The state is required to take all reasonable care to protect the life of a person involuntarily in its custody.

• • The negative obligation: the systemic and operational duty to prohibit intentional and unlawful taking of life by state agents.

• • The free-standing procedural obligation: the duty to investigate potential violations of the positive and negative obligations.

The threshold at which breaches of the positive and negative obligations occur is high. The Osman test considers the unpredictability of human conduct, operational choices which must be made in terms of priorities and resources, and the need to interpret Article 2 obligations in a way which does not impose an impossible or disproportionate burden on the authorities. But only a reasonable suspicion of breach is required to trigger the free-standing procedural obligation for an Article 2-compliant investigation into a death (Skelton et al, 2016). The procedural obligation is the primary focus of this chapter.

The form and nature of an Article 2 investigation varies across jurisdictions but must meet multiple criteria. The investigating authorities must act of their own motion.