The UN’s Human Rights Council lashed out at the UK government for ‘inhumane treatment’ of IPP prisoners
The UN has condemned the detention of UK prisoners trapped on indefinite jail terms as “arbitrary” and accused the British government of presiding over a form of psychological torture.
In a scathing 16-page document, the Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has lashed out at Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) jail terms as “inhumane treatment” due to the “mental anguish of being subjected to continuous uncertainty of a release date”.
It follows a complaint made by campaigners last year on behalf of five men who have served a combined total of 84 years incarcerated under IPP terms, including for minor crimes, as reported by The Independent.
The document stated that all five individuals are entitled to compensation and other reparations as a result of their unjust confinement.
The IPP jail terms fail on the principle of lex certa – a core principle of the Rule of Law which mandates that criminal laws must be clear, precise, and unambiguous – because it “authorized indeterminate detention without specifying any criteria that could make its endpoint foreseeable to the sentenced person or the court”, the document said.
The case was lodged in September 2025, and included a bombshell letter from former justice secretary David Lammy showing he agrees the jail term is a “grave injustice” which causes “simply horrendous” mental trauma – a letter he wrote while he was shadow justice secretary in 2021.
Although the IPP sentence was scrapped in 2012 following a damning ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), it was not abolished retrospectively, and successive governments have resisted calls to resentence more than 2,500 still languishing without a release date.
The five tragic cases being sent to the UN, which have all been highlighted by The Independent over the past 18 months, include:
The document states that the detentions, even if there were a domestic legal basis, fail the requirements set out by the UN’s Human Rights Committee as regards on liberty and security of person.
“The causal link between the original conviction and the continued detention has been broken by the disproportion between the gravity of the index offences and the duration of detention,” it wrote.
It notes that parole reviews are not truly independent of the government, given the power of the justice secretary to intervene. The recall system, it adds, means prisoners are being returned into indefinite custody for minor breaches, with 70 per cent of recalls concerning non-compliance or poor behaviour rather than new serious offences.
The original claim, brought by campaign group IPP Committee in Action, alleged the open-ended jail term is irredeemably flawed and the length of the prisoners’ incarceration bears no relation to the original crimes.
It further alleged that England and Wales are breaching international law because of the mental anguish for prisoners and their families, after 94 prisoners have taken their own lives after losing hope of being freed.
Shirley Debono, who founded the campaign group after her son, Shaun Lloyd, was handed an IPP sentence for stealing a phone, previously said: “This is the greatest miscarriage of justice. Our loved ones are suffering psychological torture, locked up in arbitrary detention.
“Our government condemns such treatment in China and Russia, yet is committing the same act here in the UK.”
The UN special rapporteur on torture, Dr Alice Edwards, has previously condemned the jail terms as “psychological torture”.
The complaint also alleges the UK remains in breach of the 2012 ECHR decision, which resulted in the sentence being abolished, with many IPP prisoners still waiting months to access courses needed for their release or facing a chaotic system of Parole Board delays.