Prison governors lose right to raise sentences

Two prisoners won a landmark legal victory over David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, in the European Court of Human Rights yesterday that strips jail governors of their rights to punish inmates by imposing extra time in prison.

The ruling, which followed a four-year legal battle by the two prisoners, will force Mr Blunkett to radically overhaul procedures for disciplining the 71,000 prisoners in England and Wales.

Prisoners Lawrence Connors and Okechukwiw Ezeh successfully argued that the quasi-judicial hearings where governors sit as judge and jury and inmates have no legal representatives are a breach of the human right to a fair trial.

The judgment by the Strasbourg Court means the Home Office will have to devise a new system to cover the 100,000 "adjudications" that take place each year to hear allegations of wrongdoing by prisoners.

The European Court took away the right of governors to add up to six weeks in "additional days" to the sentence of a prisoner who, they deemed, had misbehaved. About 80,000 extra days – 220 years – are handed to prisoners by governors each year.

Unlike sentences awarded by the courts, the governors' punishments must be served in full.

In separate hearings, Ezeh had been given 40 extra days on a charge of threatening behaviour and Connors had been awarded seven extra days for deliberately running into a prison officer while jogging in the exercise yard.

Both men, who have since been released from jail, argued in legal actions that the prison hearings they had received were unlawful. They were refused permission for their cases to be judicially reviewed and took their legal battle to the European court. Their lawyer Simon Creighton, of London firm Bhatt Murphy, said the judgment had "massive ramifications" for the Prison Service.