The interpretation of Article 2 (the right to life (Article 2 ECHR)) by the European Court of Human Rights when defining member states’ liability for homicides and suicides of individual prisoners has been overlooked by both the criminological literature and the academic studies on human rights to date, so this chapter will analyse the developments in the ECtHR’s case law based on Article 2 related to such prevention in custody, prison, immigration detention centre and secure psychiatric hospitals (for migrants and mentally ill offenders under criminal law) and their paradoxical effects on the prevention policies enacted by national governments as a result of hostile judgments by the Court. It will be demonstrated that the jurisprudential philosophy to which the European Court of Human Rights refers is marked by a risk management approach and a narrow and synchronous conception of individual suicide attempts. Against this background, in the first section of this chapter we analyse the ‘pre-suicide (which exclusively focuses on identification of suicidal intent) and risk-based approach applied by European Court of Human Rights, which relies on individual risk calculation operated by national detention authorities to the detriment of environmental factors and an holistic approach to suicide. In the second section, we consider the tension in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR between the right to life of detainees and the right to life of potential victims of terrorism and serious crimes. In the third section we turn to the ECtHR’s jurisprudence on state’s liability and its individual risk-based approach that have been translated at a national level into death avoidance and coercive practices that infringe the dignity of detainees and may reinforce their determination to kill themselves. While punitiveness implies a deliberate intention to punish, many of the coercive practices related to suicide prevention could be perceived as being punitive by the prisoners concerned. This has not prevented the ECtHR’s jurisprudence from acting as the foundation for new oversight of places of detention, to which the families of at-risk detainees may contribute but without any real effects and limitations on coerciveness.