Today, Mr Justice Sheldon handed down judgment in R (Sahayb Abu) v Secretary of State for Justice, finding in favour of Mr Abu on each of his five grounds of judicial review.
Mr Abu challenged the lawfulness of the Secretary of State’s repeated decisions to segregate him following an attack on prison officers by another prisoner on 12 April 2025. Since then – that is, for a period of 220 days (and counting) – Mr Abu, together with all other prisoners held in Separation Centres across England and Wales, has been held in conditions amounting to solitary confinement. Describing these conditions, Sheldon J accepted that for the majority of that period, “the Claimant has not been able to associate with any other prisoner in any meaningful sense: whilst it has been possible for him to speak or shout to others from his cell, he has not been able to talk with other prisoners face to face or with any privacy, he has not been able to walk alongside, touch, or share active experiences with them such as exercising together or praying together”: §286.
Sheldon J held that the impact on Mr Abu of the segregation regime was “so severe that this outweighed by some margin the rationale for the regime”. As a result, it violated both Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Sheldon J also found that the decisions to segregate Mr Abu were unlawful because they: (i) were not, in reality, taken by the prison governor contrary to the legal requirements of Rule 45 Prison Rules (but were taken by the Secretary of State); (ii) breached the Tameside duty of inquiry because no rational decision maker could have failed to obtain a psychiatric assessment of Mr Abu before imposing prolonged, rolling periods of solitary confinement; (iii) contravened the Public Sector Equality Duty; and (iv) were procedurally unfair, as Mr Abu was never shown even a “gist” of the intelligence material used against him.
The decision is significant as it marks a rare finding by a domestic court that the conditions in which a prisoner has been held amount to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” in violation of Article 3 of the ECHR. Mr Justice Sheldon observed that Mr Abu’s suffering “goes way beyond the inevitable element of suffering that is connected with segregation”: §302.
Mr Abu was represented by Tim Owen KC, Tim James-Matthews, Catherine Arnold and Zoë Brereton, instructed by Birnberg-Peirce.