Enforcement Drift and the Administrative Life of Absolute Rights: Article 3 Prison-Conditions Claims before the European Court of Human Rights, 1990–2025

The vulnerability of an absolute right cannot be read from doctrine alone. Drawing on a hand-coded corpus of 1,775 European Court of Human Rights judgements on Article 3 prison conditions between 1990 and 2025, this article examines whether resource scarcity has entered adjudication as an accepted justification. Among 1,748 coded judgements, States plead scarcity in only nine, with the Court finding violations on each occasion. The strongest form of the resource-erosion account therefore finds no support. Enforcement has nonetheless changed. Decomposition, regression and change-point analysis show that the aggregate decline in application of the CPT benchmark is driven chiefly by migration into routinised committee disposition, entailing more formulaic remedies. This article calls this enforcement drift, namely the redistribution of first-order scrutiny across procedural channels while the substantive standard remains intact. Assessing absolute rights’ resilience therefore requires attention to their administrative life, not only their doctrinal formulation. Preprint (author’s original manuscript). Submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.