In England and Wales, whole-life imprisonment is the harshest sanction available to the courts, emerging in the decades after the abolition of the death penalty. The whole-life order requires people to spend their whole lives in prison with no prospect of release, except on exceptional compassionate grounds.
From 1988, whole-life sentences (called “whole-life tariffs”) could be imposed by the home secretary and were used for handful of criminals. However, a number of legal challenges in the 1990s chipped away at the home secretary’s power to do so. In 2003, the Criminal Justice Act formally introduced whole-life orders, giving judges the power to impose them.
The European Court of Human Rights initially ruled in 2013 in response to a challenge from three people serving whole-life tariffs that these sentences breached human rights law, as they constituted inhuman and degrading treatment. A later ruling in 2017 found that the compassionate release clause (part of the 1997 Crime Act) keeps the order lawful. However, notably, no one has ever been released under it.
