European Court awards damages to Moroccan national for prolonged detention

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) this week ruled in favour of a Moroccan national, an asylum seeker who sued Cyprus for his prolonged detention on national security grounds. In the case of KA v Cyprus, the Strasbourg court found that the Republic violated Article 5, Paragraph 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to liberty and security, permitting deprivation of liberty only in exhaustive, legally prescribed circumstances. The Moroccan national, known only by his initials KA, was held at the Menoyia Detention Centre for Prohibited Immigrants from January 2019 to February 2020. His application to the ECtHR had two facets: his long detention as well as the procedural fairness of the judicial review of that detention, which relied in part on documents that were not disclosed to the applicant. Now residing in Oroklini, the Moroccan national had entered Cyprus irregularly through the north and applied for asylum on January 10, 2019. On the same day, authorities ordered his detention on national-security grounds because a database of a cooperating foreign service had flagged him as a terrorism suspect. He remained in detention until February 24, 2020, when the Supreme Court ordered his release on a writ of habeas corpus. In the meantime, the Administrative Court had found the detention lawful, relying also on three classified documents that had not been disclosed to the applicant. In its ruling, the ECtHR found that Cypriot authorities lacked a consistent understanding of the purpose of the detention, that the material underlying the suspicions remained unchanged and that the asylum proceedings had not been advanced. It held that there was no sufficiently close connection with the prevention of unauthorised entry and that the 13.5-month duration exceeded what was reasonably required. As regards the applicant’s other complaint, the court held that the applicant had been informed of the legal basis and reasons for his detention, had access to the remaining relevant material, was represented by a lawyer and was able to challenge the open material before the domestic courts. It therefore found no violation. The Strasbourg court awarded the applicant €5,000 in non-pecuniary damages (mental grief) plus €3,750 for legal expenses. The Republic of Cyprus has three months to pay the damages.