Holding: France’s failure to enforce orders by the urgent-applications judge of the Administrative Court for the provision of emergency accommodation to a number of homeless and particularly vulnerable asylum-seekers was in violation of Article 6 § 1 ECtHR.
The French authorities had failed in their duties under domestic law. They were found responsible
for the conditions in which the applicants had been living for several months: sleeping rough,
without access to sanitary facilities, having no means of subsistence and constantly in fear of being
attacked or robbed. The applicants had thus been victims of degrading treatment, showing a lack of
respect for their dignity.
The Court found that such living conditions, combined with the lack of an appropriate response from
the French authorities and the fact that the domestic courts had systematically objected that the
competent bodies lacked resources in the light of their status as single young men, had exceeded
the threshold of severity for the purposes of Article 3 of the Convention. The three applicants N.H.,
K.T. and A.J. had thus found themselves, through the fault of the French authorities, in a situation
that was incompatible with Article 3 of the Convention.
