Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has pledged to appeal at the European Court of Human Rights after his own country’s supreme court today refused to hear his plea about ‘inhumane’ prison conditions.
The neo-Nazi, who gunned down 69 people and blew up eight in Norway in 2011, was told the Norwegian Supreme Court will not take up the appeal he lodged against his treatment in jail.
But his lawyer, Oystein Storrvik, said Breivik, 38, wants to take the case to Strasbourg ‘as soon as possible’.
He added: ‘We’ve always been prepared for the possibility that our case before the Norwegian courts may not succeed.’
Breivik has previously said he is being ‘damaged by the isolation’ and claimed ‘radicalisation has been a consequence of it’.
‘I have not been a little hurt, I have been very damaged,’ he said.
Breivik was seeking to overturn a March decision by a Norwegian appeals court that ruled his near-isolation in a three-room cell respected human rights.
‘The Supreme Court’s appeal commission has unanimously decided on June 8, 2017 to not further consider Anders Behring Breivik’s appeal in the case Breivik has brought against the state,’ the court said in a statement.
‘No part of Breivik’s appeal has the possibility of winning in front of the Supreme Court,’ it added.
‘Neither does the case raise questions about the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights that have not already been clarified extensively by the European Court of Human Rights.’
In 2015 a lower court in Norway ruled that jail conditions for Breivik breach a ban on ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The case was dismissed on the grounds that he had not been subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment
His lawyer then stressed the case is ‘really about a person that is sitting very, very alone in a small prison within a prison’.
He dismissed the benefits of the weekly visits by a state-appointed prison confidante for Breivik, saying ‘it’s a paid job.’
But the Norwegian state said extreme restrictions are needed after Breivik gunned down 69 people, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp of the then-ruling Labour Party on July 22, 2011, after detonating a bomb in central Oslo that killed eight.
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