Judgment concerning Switzerland
In the case of N.D. v. Switzerland, the Court held that there had been a violation of the right to life.
The applicant, who had been unaware of her partner’s criminal record, was kidnapped by him from her home after informing him that she wished to end their relationship. She was then falsely imprisoned over an 11-hour period and subjected to rape and ill-treatment. To this day, the applicant suffers from the psychological after-effects of the treatment inflicted on her.
The Court found that the authorities had not done all that could reasonably have been expected of them to avert the real and immediate risk to the applicant’s life, of which they had been or ought to have been aware. It noted that there had been neither an adequate assessment of the risk to the applicant’s life nor operational measures which might have had a real chance of altering the course of events or mitigating the damage caused. In view of the lack of sufficient coordination between the various services and the shortcomings in the domestic law in force at the time, the Swiss authorities had failed to comply with their positive obligation to protect the applicant’s life from her partner’s violent actions.