Bamber and other killers take whole life term fight to Europe

The hearing will test whether the UK’s law allowing the most dangerous offenders to be sentenced to whole life tariffs, meaning they will never be released, amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will hear the case in Strasbourg in November.

It comes after Europe’s human rights judges ruled in January that Britain’s most dangerous and notorious criminals could be kept behind bars for the rest of their lives.

Condemning people to die in jail was not “grossly disproportionate” and in each case London’s High Court had “decided that an all-life tariff was required, relatively recently and following a fair and detailed consideration”, the judges ruled.

That ruling will now be tested by the court’s Grand Chamber after a panel of five judges granted the appeal by killer Douglas Vinter, who stabbed his wife in February 2008. Vinter’s appeal means the cases of Bamber, who killed his parents, sister and her two young children in August 1985, and Peter Moore, who killed four gay men for his sexual gratification in 1995, will also be considered by the Grand Chamber judges.

Bamber’s solicitor, Simon McKay, said: “He’s obviously delighted with the decision.

“It is part of his long battle to challenge the Home Secretary of the day going beyond what the trial judge said would be the appropriate sentence he should receive.”

The European Court of Human Rights held by four votes to three in January that there had been no violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is enshrined in UK law under the Human Rights Act and prohibits “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Under current law, whole-life tariff prisoners will almost certainly never be released from prison as their offences are deemed to be so serious.

They can be freed only by the Justice Secretary, who can give discretion on compassionate grounds when the prisoner is terminally ill or seriously incapacitated.

Bamber, now 51, has been behind bars for more than 25 years for shooting his wealthy adopted parents June and Neville, his sister Sheila Caffell and her six-year-old twin sons Daniel and Nicholas at their farmhouse in Essex.

He was given a whole-life tariff after being convicted of the murders in October 1986.

But he has always protested his innocence and claims his schizophrenic sister Ms Caffell shot her family before turning the gun on herself in a remote Essex farmhouse.

Vinter was released from prison after serving nine years for the 1995 murder of work colleague Carl Edon, 22. Three years later he stabbed wife Anne White four times and strangled her, before being given a whole-life order.

Moore was convicted of four counts of murder in 1996.

He was told by his trial judge he was as dangerous a man as it was possible to find. He befriended the serial killer GP Harold Shipman when the two were held in prison in Wakefield.

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: “The European court upheld the view of our domestic courts that the imposition of whole life tariffs for the most exceptionally serious cases is justified.

“It goes without saying that the Government will be fighting the case vigorously in the Grand Chamber and defending the principle of the whole life tariff.”