In a speech to the European Law Academy in March 2010, the European Commission Vice President, Viviane Reding, highlighted a range of concerns relating to prison conditions in European Union Member States. Citing both the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights, the Commissioner warned that inhuman or degrading prison conditions have the potential to seriously undermine new EU rules on prisoner transfer due to be implemented by the end of 2011. As a result, the Commission intends to publish a paper on prison conditions in Europe in advance of this implementation date. This article examines whether the European Commission are correct to be concerned about prison conditions within the European Union. We highlight that shortcomings in some EU prison regimes from a human rights perspective may indeed have serious implicationsfor nascent EU policy in the areas of prisoner and sentence execution transfer and that this, in turn, may adversely affect the wider Mutual Recognition process. There are, furthermore, problems arising from the content of the EU’s legal instruments concerning prisoner and sentence execution transfer themselves. Attention is also paid to the ramifications of the Treaty of Lisbon focusing on the way in which the EU’s accession to the ECHR and the (now) legally binding nature of the EU’s own Charter of Fundamental Rights may magnify these difficulties. The article concludes
by discussing the possible courses of action open to the EU to address these problems.