6.  The applicant was born in 1973. At present he is serving a life sentence in Leopoldov Prison. 7.  The applicant was accused of several serious offences. In that context he was detained pending trial from 1 September 2001 to 9 February 2006. On the latter date he started serving a nine-year prison term to which he had been sentenced for robbery. Further details are set out in the decision of 20 October 2010 on the admissibility of the present application. 8.  During his detention on remand the applicant lodged several complaints with the Directorate General of Prison Administration, in which he complained about the conditions of his detention. He raised many issues, among which were the restrictions on his visiting rights (visits were allowed only once a month for thirty minutes and it was only possible to speak to visitors through a partition), the right to buy food in prison, the lack of hot water in his cell, and a lack of contact with other prisoners. He also alleged that convicted prisoners serving a sentence had more rights than he had as a remand prisoner. 9.  The Directorate General of Prison Administration sent replies to the applicant on more than ten occasions. It found all of the applicant’s complaints to be ill-founded. It also held that the conditions in the prisons in which the applicant had been detained during the investigation and judicial proceedings had been in conformity with the relevant law. 10.  Furthermore, the applicant has been obliged, both during his detention and after his conviction, to use half of the money he received from his family to reimburse the debt which he owed to the State (this debt resulted from court decisions and from the statutory obligation to contribute to his maintenance in prison), failing which he was not allowed to buy supplementary food in the prison shop.
Thus, the applicant’s overall debt amounted to the equivalent of some 750 euros (EUR) in March 2008. In the period from December 2002 to January 2008 he had reimbursed approximately EUR 360 of the debt. 11.  On 16 January 2003 the applicant lodged a complaint with the Prosecutor General submitting that his human rights had been violated. He complained, inter alia, about the manner in which the State had forced him to reimburse the debt resulting from the statutory obligation to contribute to his maintenance in prison. 12.  On 30 January 2003 the Prosecutor General dismissed that complaint as no breach of the law had been found in the applicant’s case. 13.  During the whole period of his detention during the investigation and trial the applicant could not watch television, whereas convicted prisoners had the possibility of watching television programmes collectively in the assembly room of the relevant prison wing. Through the prison broadcast system the prison administration let the detainees listen to a public and a private radio station, each of which was transmitted every other day. For almost the whole period of his detention pending trial the applicant was kept alone in his cell.