The man convicted of murdering Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman must serve a minimum of 40 years before being considered for parole.
Ian Huntley killed the two ten-year-olds in August 2002 after luring them into his house, which came with his job as a caretaker at a college in the same grounds as the girls' primary school in Cambridgeshire.
He was convicted and jailed for life in December 2003.
Ian Huntley
The presiding high court judge, Judge Alan Moses, said today that Huntley, who is being held at Wakefield top security prison, must stay in jail for a minimum of 40 years before being considered for parole.
The parents of Holly and Jessica attended the hearing.
Huntley, who did not attend, always denied murdering the two girls, claiming that their deaths in his house had been accidents.
Prosecutors suggested that the crime had been sexually motivated and he had killed the girls when something went wrong with his plans.
A newspaper report last year said Huntley had admitted to his own parents that he had deliberately killed Jessica but had still not explained what had happened to Holly.
An inquiry into the murders discovered that Huntley had got the job at Soham Village College despite being a suspected sex offender. Police had failed to vet him properly.
His girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who had been a teaching assistant at the girls' school, was granted indefinite anonymity earlier this year following her release from prison in May 2004 to protect her from reprisal attacks.
She had served half of a three-and-a-half year sentence for providing Huntley with a false alibi.