Status of implementation of the right to health care and medical assistance in accordance with European standards by persons serving punishments in the form of deprivation of liberty in Ukraine

Provisions of Articles 1 and 3 of the Constitution of Ukraine define the priority duty of the state to ensure and realize the rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen, and therefore one of the most important aspects of the formation of a legal social state is the creation of effective national mechanisms for regulatory and legal protection of the right to health care of individuals, who are serving prison sentences, as well as effective law enforcement (implementation of legal norms) in the field of penitentiary medicine. The article is devoted to one of the actual practice-oriented problems of modern criminal-executive law of Ukraine – the analysis of the state of implementation of European standards regarding the provision of medical care to persons sentenced to imprisonment. The authors dwell on some problems of the right to a proper and sufficient level of medical and sanitary support for convicts serving a prison sentence. In particular, attention is drawn to the state of legality and discovered by the prosecutor’s office violations of the constitutional rights of those sentenced to imprisonment for health care and proper medical care, which lead to a threat to the health and life of the patients themselves and to the threat of infection with infectious diseases of other convicts serving their sentences in the form of deprivation of liberty in one correctional institution of the State Criminal-Executive Service of Ukraine, which are equated according to Article 3 of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms to torture and inhuman treatment. On the other hand, a number of problems remain unsolved in the field of health care of prisoners sentenced to imprisonment, who are serving their sentences in correctional colonies and pretrial detention centers of the State Criminal-Executive Service of Ukraine. An indisputable positive achievement of domestic penitentiary medicine is the tendency to bring national mechanisms of legal regulation of criminal-executive relations in the field of health care of prisoners to accordance with European standards and the practice of the European Court of Human Rights.