Hugues de Suremain is co-founder of the EPLN. He was formerly the legal coordinator of the French NGO Observatoire International des Prisons (2004-2010) and practicing lawyer in Paris in a law firm specialised before the supreme courts of France.

Based on its litigation practice before the European Court of Human Rights and UN bodies for the protection of the right to health of people in prison, the European Prison Litigation Network aims to report on the challenges faced by incarcerated people who use drugs to access harm reduction services in conditions and quality equivalent to the ones enjoyed by people in community. While the right to health protection for people in prison is firmly enshrined in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, main vehicle for recognition of the rights of prisoners in Europe, and access to harm reduction services is widely promoted by international soft law, the Strasbourg judges are having difficulty endorsing it as such. The aim of this presentation is to highlight the inconsistencies in this approach, which deprives the Court of its role as a guiding light on a central issue of health protection and the right to respect for dignity in detention. The presentation will show that by refraining from confronting the States on their harm reduction policies, the European Court is allowing situations to develop which, both from a public health perspective and in terms of the conception of rights, undermine not only the rights of incarcerated people who use drugs but also the coherence of the jurisprudential construction of the protection of detainees' rights that it has patiently built since the beginning of the 2000s. Using the example of the European Court, the presentation will emphasise the importance of recognition, at the level of regional courts and UN quasi-judicial bodies, of the right to access harm reduction services in terms of the effectiveness of the principles promoted by the various international instruments in this area.