Chapter 5 • Human Rights and Arrest, Pre-Trial and Administrative Detention 4.3 Detention after conviction Although the European Convention, in its article 5(1)(a), is the only treaty explicitly providing for the “lawful detention of a person after conviction by a competent court”, this legitimate ground for deprivation of liberty is, of course, implicit in the other treaty provisions. It goes without saying, however, that once the officially determined prison sentence has been served, the convicted person must be released. Where convicted persons have not been released although having fully served their sentence of imprisonment, the Human Rights Committee has naturally found that their detention violated article 9(1) of the International Covenant.43 In article 5(1)(a) of the European Convention, “the word ‘conviction’ ... has to be understood as signifying both a ‘finding of guilt’, after ‘it has been established in accordance with the law that there has been an offence’ (...), and the imposition of a penalty or other measure involving deprivation of liberty”; further, the “word ‘after’ does not simply mean that the ‘detention’ must follow the ‘conviction’ in point of time: in addition, the ‘detention’ must result from, ‘follow and depend upon’ or occur ‘by virtue of’ the ‘conviction’”.44 What, then, is the situation where a judgement has two components, whereby, in addition to comprising a penalty involving the deprivation of liberty, it also places the offender at the Government’s disposal, a component the execution of which may take different forms ranging from remaining at liberty under supervision to detention? In the case of Van Droogenbroeck the European Court accepted that there had been no violation of article 5(1) of the European Convention by virtue of the decisions of the Minister of Justice to revoke the applicant’s conditional release; the Court considered that the manner in which the Belgian authorities “exercised their discretion respected the requirements of the Convention, which allows a measure of indeterminacy in sentencing and does not oblige the Contracting States to entrust to the courts the general supervision of the execution of sentences”.45 However, “a detention that was lawful at the outset would be transformed into a deprivation of liberty that was arbitrary”, if the decisions concerned “were based on grounds that had no connection with the objectives of the legislature and the court or on an assessment that was unreasonable in terms of those objectives”.46 43 Communication No. R.2/8, A. M. García Lanza de Netto on behalf of B. Weismann Lanza and A. Lanza Perdomo (Views adopted on 3 April 1980), in UN doc. GAOR, A/35/40, p. 118, para. 16. 44 Eur. Court HR, Van Droogenbroeck Case, judgment of 24 June 1982, Series A, No. 50, p. 19, para. 35. 45 Ibid., p. 20, para. 40. 46 Ibid., loc. cit. 172 Human Rights in the Administration of Justice: A Manual on Human Rights for Judges, Prosecutors and Lawyers