Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 147
December 2011
Ajdarić v. Croatia - 20883/09
Judgment 13.12.2011 [Section I]
Article 6
Criminal proceedings
Article 6-1
Fair hearing
Insufficient reasoning in criminal conviction leading to forty-year prison sentence: violation
Facts – In 2005 the applicant was arrested for car theft and detained in a remand prison. During his detention, he fell ill and was transferred to a prison hospital, where he shared a room with seven other inmates. One of these inmates, M.G., was accused of killing three people in 1998, and another, S.Š., was a former police officer who had been sentenced for attempted murder. At an unspecified date, S.Š. informed the police that he had knowledge of the circumstances of the 1998 murders. He later gave a statement before the investigating judge of the competent county court explaining that he had overheard private conversations between the applicant and M.G. which revealed that the applicant had in fact been an accomplice to the three murders M.G. had been accused of. The applicant was subsequently charged on three counts of murder and the criminal proceedings against him were joined to those already pending against M.G. S.Š. repeated his testimony in court, but two other inmates, who had spent time with them in the same room at the prison hospital, did not support his evidence. A psychiatric report concluding that S.Š. was suffering from emotionally instability and histrionic personality disorder was also submitted to the court. The county court ultimately sentenced the applicant and M.G. each to forty years’ imprisonment and the judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court.
Law – Article 6 § 1: According to the Court’s established case-law, judgments of courts and tribunals should be properly reasoned, although the extent of this duty might vary according to the nature of the decision and the circumstances of each particular case. The Court noted at the outset that the applicant had been sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment on three counts of murder solely on the basis of evidence given by S.Š. The national courts had expressly stated that there had been no other evidence implicating the applicant in the murders at issue. However, they had made no efforts to verify S.Š.’s statements but had accepted them as truthful, irrespective of the medical evidence that he suffered from emotional instability and histrionic personality disorder and had not received the psychiatric treatment that had been recommended for him. Moreover, his statements referring to the applicant’s involvement in the murders were unclear, imprecise and often contradictory. Despite this, the domestic courts had made no comments on the evidence to the contrary that had been given by other inmates who had shared the room with the applicant, M.G. and S.Š. For those reasons, the Court concluded that the decisions reached in the applicant’s case had not been adequately reasoned, had failed to observe the basic criminal-justice requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt and had not been in accordance with the in dubio pro reo principle.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41: EUR 9,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage; respondent State required to secure the reopening of the proceedings, should the applicant so request.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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