Strip searches through the lens of the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment in European human rights law

It has been twenty years since the European Court of Human Rights' ('ECtHR' or 'the Court') first found that a body search amounted to a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights ('ECHR'), which provides that: 'No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'.1 In its judgment in Valašinas v Lithuania, the ECtHR centred on the search alone – a strip search – despite the applicant's argument that both his general conditions of imprisonment and the search he had been subjected to were incompatible with the right.2 Finding that the detention conditions did not violate Article 3, the ECtHR focused on what it was about the search, in which the applicant was searched naked in front of a female officer and was asked to squat while his genitals and food were examined by officers not wearing gloves, that brought the experience within the scope of the Article 3 prohibition. The Court described this constellation of factors as having 'diminished' the applicant's human dignity.3