Decision of the Court of cassation, VI Criminal Section, No. 46212 of 18 November 2013

The 1989 Extradition Treaty between Italy and Brazil does not allow extradition when there is a reasonable fear that the requested person will be submitted to breaches of fundamental human rights in the requesting state. For this reason, the Court of Cassation annulled the decision of the Court of Appeal of Rome to extradite a Dutch national to Brazil, where he was at risk to suffer a inhuman or degrading treatment as a consequence of the chronic overcrowding and of the decay and neglect of prisons, documented by Amnesty International and other NGOs. Remembering the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Cassation rejected the argument of the Court of Appeal according to which the conditions of prisons in Brazil, being a factual situation, were irrelevant to decide on the extradition. Concerning the circumstance that also the Italian prisons suffer from a chronic overcrowding amounting to inhuman or degrading treatment  (according to the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the Torreggiani case), the Court of Cassation noted that the situations in the two countries are not comparable and, in any case, the conditions of the Italian prisons were not relevant to decide on the extradition.