On 5 February, the Committee of Ministers ended its supervision of the execution of the European Court’s judgment in Schmidt and Šmigol v. Estonia concerning protracted periods of solitary confinement.
On 1 April 2024, the Estonian Imprisonment Act was amended to ensure that the time served consecutively in a punishment cell shall not exceed 14 days, which is also the maximum number of days allowed for a single disciplinary cell punishment to be imposed. For minors the time spent in a punishment cell shall not exceed three consecutive days. With this change in law, the length of the maximum solitary confinement sentence was therefore shortened from 45 days to 14 days. The law requires that once the maximum number of consecutive punishment days allowed has been reached, there must be a reasonable break before the punishment continues. This break cannot be shorter than 48 hours and shall be assessed individually for each person.
