Most European countries do not meet UN criteria for investigating deaths in custody
Between 2020 and 2022, 13 EU countries, including Spain, France and Germany recorded at least 487 deaths in custody or in police operations.
“I screamed ‘My son is sick, he needs help. They did not listen, they came to kill,” says Momtaz Al Madani. On 30 May 2018, Momtaz’s son Yazan Al Madani, 27, had a psychotic break and went screaming out on the balcony of his home in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, holding a knife. His father called the police and shortly afterwards several officers arrived armed with guns, shields, tasers and dogs. First, the police released their dogs on Yazan, then they tased him twice and shot him. Yazan died shortly afterwards. A year later, the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s Office decided not to prosecute the officers involved on the grounds that they acted in self-defense. Since 2022, the European Court of Human Rights has been investigating the death of Yazan Al Madani.
For this investigation we requested data on deaths in police custody and in police actions, through information requests and government press offices, from all EU countries. For more information see the methodology.
Between 2020 and 2022, at least 487 people died in custody or in police operations in the 13 EU countries that publish data or provided it to us. France has the highest absolute figures: between 2020 and 2022 it counted 107 deaths in custody or in police operations. It is followed by Ireland, Spain and Germany, with 71, 66 and 60 respectively. However, based on population, Ireland is the country with by far the most deaths per capita: 1.34 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in that time period, compared to 0.14 in Spain or 0.06 in Portugal. The actual number of deaths is higher, as the data provided by several countries is incomplete.
“When making comparisons with other jurisdictions, it is important to bear in mind how these incidents are defined and categorised, which can vary considerably,” writes the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission in Ireland.
The UN recommended in 1991 that countries provide public information on all police-related deaths. Portugal began publishing theirs in 1997, Denmark in 2012, Ireland in 2008 and France only in 2018. The Netherlands only reports cases investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and Sweden’s Agency of Forensic Medicine reports deaths it attributes to any police action and its police report deaths due to police shootings. Finally, Slovenia’s police publish deaths due to police action. The remaining EU countries do not regularly report this information.
In 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights requested data from all countries on deaths in custody, from the moment of arrest, while in police custody and in prison. In its response, the Council of Europe confirms the lack of data and points out that there is not even a common definition and methodology in the Union as to what constitutes a death in custody and how to investigate them.
“The most serious thing is that nobody cares that these people die, and this insensitivity on the part of citizens means that the States have no interest in keeping a register either,” says Jorge del Cura, a Spanish activist who has been monitoring these deaths for decades and who in 2019 received the National Human Rights Award. In Spain, the Ministry of the Interior only records deaths involving the National Police and the Civil Guard; the autonomous communities have information on their autonomous police forces, but no administration centralizes the cases occurring in municipal police forces.
“It’s still a kind of taboo in France to talk about this, because as soon as you accuse the police, you’re against the police,” says journalist Ivan du Roy, of Basta!, a French independent media outlet, which became the first to collect information on deaths in custody and in police operations in 2014, years before the General Inspectorate of the National Police began publishing information in 2018.
Controle Alt Delete, a civil society organisation in the Netherlands, has been investigating cases of deaths in custody or police actions since 2016. “We started after we realised in 2015 that the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the police were not publishing all the data,” says Jair Schalkwijk, a lawyer and co-founder of the organisation. He points out that, previously, the Public Prosecutor’s Office only published reports on the use of weapons by officers and how many times they ended in death. “We have forced the government to report all cases of police-related deaths,” Schalkwijk adds. In neighbouring Germany, the federal government still only collects figures on police shooting deaths, as does Sweden.
Migrants and people with mental illness, the main victims
Of the 13 countries that have provided data on deaths in contact with the police between 2020 and 2022, Hungary provides information on the nationality of the deceased in all cases, and Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain in some of the cases. Together they provided nationality data for 55 of the 487 deaths reported in those three years. Half were foreigners.
Mathieu Rigouste is an independent French sociologist. He links this concentration of deaths among migrant populations to the colonial history of countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and France. “Police crimes are concentrated on non-white proletarians,” Rigouste says. Adama Traoré, born in France to Malian parents,is an example: police arrested Traoré in 2016 in Beaumont-sur-Oise, outside Paris, and he died in police custody. “Traoré was a black proletarian from a suburban neighbourhood who was chased by the police, captured and strangled. He was criminalised first by the police and then by the media and politicians,” Rigouste says.
Having a mental illness is also an important factor. Most of the public administrations we contacted did not provide specific information on this either. Only Denmark, Spain, France and Germany confirmed that the deceased had mental health problems or was in a “state of agitation” in 43 cases.
The most current Dutch reports do not provide data on whether the deceased had mental health problems, but an earlier report commissioned by the Dutch government on deaths between 2016 and 2020 does: there is data on 40 of the 50 people who died in that period, and of those, 28 had a mental illness. The data collected by Controle Alt Delete is even more shocking. Of the 105 deaths they have monitored since 2015, around 70% were people who had some form of mental illness. Despite this, Schalkwijk says, there have so far been no changes in the Dutch police system aimed at preventing such deaths. “They have not changed anything, even though they know that many of the people who die at the hands of the police suffer from mental illness,” warns Schalkwijk.
Yazan Al Madani was one of the people who died in the Netherlands in 2018. He had arrived in the country a year earlier from Syria as a refugee, just like his father Momtaz Al Madani. “He was a very generous and very intelligent boy, but he was very sensitive,” Momtaz explains: “That’s why I brought him to the Netherlands.” However, Yazan’s arrival as a refugee in the country was very hard. For the first eight months he had no access to psychiatric treatment, and then the Dutch administration rejected his request for assistance – the public medical system would not provide him with the medicines he needed for housing and for reunification with his wife, who is also Syrian. “He was left on the street with nothing: no money, no wife, no house, no medical treatment… nothing,” says Momtaz: “They killed him a thousand times before they killed him for real.”
In September this year, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities alerted the Netherlands and Belgium to the high number of people with disabilities who had died under the responsibility of their law enforcement agencies and recommended that the countries improve their training.
Gunshot wounds, the leading cause of death
Gunshot wounds by officers are the leading cause of deaths in custody or in police interventions. In the countries that have provided information on causes of these deaths, more than one in three deaths between 2020 and 2022 were from gunshot wounds. At least 98 people died. 41 were in France and 27 in Germany.
According to Basta! the number of deaths caused by police shootings in France began to rise in 2017. That year, then-president François Hollande’s government [reformed the Public Security Law, loosening the limits on when officers could use their firearms. ´
Police shooting deaths are not the only ones. The police sometimes kill people using supposedly non-lethal weaponry, such as tasers, which they sometimes use following protocols that contradict the manufacturer’s recommendations, such as using them against people in a state of agitation. Between 2020 and 2022, we identified at least eight cases of deaths after police use of Tasers: three in the Netherlands, one in France and four in Germany, although in three of the German cases the official reports state that the cause of death was not related. In five of these cases the person was mentally ill or agitated. In addition to these, during the same period. Catalan autonomous police the Mossos d’Esquadra killed Badalona resident Antonio with six shocks from a taser. The Catalan Department of the Interior reported that a weapon was used in this police action, but did not specify that it was a taser gun, meaning that there may be other such cases hidden in the official figures.
The second most repeated official cause of death in our investigation is “natural,” with 55 people dying between 2020 and 2022. It is a catch-all used mainly by Spain, which reports 27 natural deaths, in most cases without further data on the context. In 2018, Stephan Lache also died “natural death” in police custody in Spain. according to the Ministry of the Interior. Spanish National Police officers arrested Lache at 4am and took him to a Madrid police station. The police report states that he had an aggressive attitude and self-harmed, so the police called the emergency medical service. The images recorded by the police station’s cameras show how three medical staff and two police officers grab him to give him an injection. The next day, the police officers found him dead in the cell.
Arrested for drunkenness, died in custody
In many other deaths labeled as “natural,” the deceased showed a state of drug and alcohol intoxication.
In Ireland, being drunk in a public space is a criminal offense. The Irish Ombudsman’s data on deaths in custody or in police actions does not include information on whether the deceased persons were drunk, but in 2022 the Irish Ombudsman made a number of recommendations aimed at preventing deaths in custody related to this issue.
“During the investigation of an incident by GSOC, even if no individual wrongdoing is found, systemic issues of policy and practice that, if left uncorrected, can leave unresolved risk,” the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) writes, adding that when such issues are identified, the GSOC issues “systemic recommendations” to the police authority, but these are not binding. “The Policing, Security and Community Safety Act, 2024, when commenced, provides a statutory basis for any future recommendations.”
In France, it is also common for police to take intoxicated people to spend the night in police cells, according to the Public Health Code. Between 2020 and 2022, at least 19 people who were intoxicated or had taken drugs died in French police cells due to health problems.
Although the Finnish Ministry of the Interior has not provided data by year, it confirmed to Civio that 16 of the deaths that have taken place between 2013 and 2023 were caused by alcohol and drug intoxication. “Alcohol and drug use was at least a contributory factor in deaths in more than half of the cases,” writes the Police Department of the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, which adds that the police traditionally take drunk people to the police station, “even when the person is calm and does not cause any disturbance to public order or security.” The ministry is trying to get police officers to abandon this practice, it states: “Instead of police services, they would need health monitoring.” Finnish police have implemented measures to prevent such deaths, such as more training for officers, more surveillance cameras and the use of technology to monitor the vital functions of detainees.
Between 2020 and 2022, we have identified at least 43 people who died by suicide in police custody. Most of these deaths were in Spain, France and Denmark, but in other countries, with fewer deaths in contact with the police, and fewer people, suicides account for almost all deaths in police custody. Latvia reported five deaths in police custody between 2020 and 2022, and two more in 2023. Hungary reported six deaths. In Germany, no state has reported cases of suicide, but at least one of them, Bavaria, points out that such deaths are not included in the reports if they have not been preceded by coercive measures by officers.
Insufficient research
Despite the UN’s recommendation that the process of investigating security force-related deaths should be subject to public scrutiny, in most cases information on these investigations is scarce. Austria states that it has been limited to autopsies. “In all cases, a medical examination was carried out and a subsequent report was made to the public prosecutor. Since no signs of third-party guilt were found in any of the cases, the public prosecutor did not initiate any investigative measures,” the Austrian Interior Ministry states.
The Netherlands Public Prosecutor’s Office’s annual report on police-related deaths includes only cases that have been investigated. However, every year there are a couple of cases that do not see justice, Controle Alt Delete reports. One of them, in 2022, involved a man who climbed onto a roof and was either mentally ill or in a state of agitation. “The police tried to bring him down and several officers went up to the roof to bring him down, but he jumped off and died,” Schalkwijk says, who points out that this case was not investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which ruled that the death was not related to the police intervention.
Since 2010, the European Court of Human Rights has condemned EU countries 236 times for failing to investigate possible cases of torture or mistreatment and a further 157 times for failing to investigate deaths, both in contact with the police and in other contexts. Romania, which refused to provide data on police-related deaths to our investigation, has 79 convictions for failing to investigate possible cases of mistreatment and torture, and a further 60 for deaths, including those of five people killed in an anti-government demonstration. Bulgaria and Italy, which also refused to provide data for our investigation, have 57 and 33 convictions respectively for violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In most cases of death, public administrations have also failed to provide data on criminal or employment consequences for the police officers involved. They did provide such data for 97 of the 487 cases registered between 2020 and 2022. Of these, the only case in which the administration has confirmed the imprisonment of the officers involved took place in the Basque Country in Spain. In 84 cases investigated, the officers involved did not suffer any consequences. The investigation is still ongoing in three cases.
The data published by the Netherlands Public Prosecutor’s Office does not include information on the conclusions of the investigations, but Controle Alt Delete requested details on each case. “We know that, from 2016 until now, in 6% of the cases, the officers involved have been prosecuted, usually in road traffic deaths,” Schalkwijk says. In one of these cases, the officers were punished with 200 and 240 hours of community service respectively, and in another case the officer was acquitted.
