Irreducible life imprisonment - a few comments on the new institution of the ban on conditional release from serving the rest of the life sentence in the Polish criminal law

Abstract

This article concerns the prohibition of conditional early release from serving the remainder of a life sentence, which was introduced into the Polish Criminal Code. The so-called "irreducible life imprisonment" is a violation of the prohibition of inhuman treatment under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly reminded. The author presents selected case law of the Court in this regard and analyzes it in terms of Polish solutions. As a result, she comes to the conclusion that the adopted solutions not only contradict the Convention, but also have no substantive justification in view of the systematically falling crime rate in Poland, constituting only and exclusively the implementation of a new, repressive and populist criminal policy.