Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 178
October 2014
Baytar v. Turkey - 45440/04
Judgment 14.10.2014 [Section II]
Article 6
Criminal proceedings
Article 6-3-e
Free assistance of interpreter
Lack of access to an interpreter during police questioning: violation
Facts – On 17 December 2001 the applicant visited her brother, who was serving a prison sentence in connection with a case involving the PKK, an illegal armed organisation. She was arrested after being searched and found in possession of a document concerning, among other matters, the PKK’s strategy and its activities inside prisons. The following day she was questioned by two gendarmes in Turkish. She said she had found the document by chance in the waiting room and picked it up. The record of the interview indicated that she had been informed of her right to legal assistance but did not wish to have any. In the course of a hearing before a judge on 18 December 2001 at which she was assisted by an interpreter she said that the statement she had given to the gendarmes referred to events in a previous set of proceedings and that no document had been found in her possession on 17 December. At her subsequent trial, she was assisted by a lawyer and an interpreter. In convicting her, the court relied, among other things, on the inconsistent statements she had made at the pre-trial stage.
Law – Article 6 § 3 (e) in conjunction with Article 6 § 1: The applicant alleged that her trial had been unfair as a result of her not having an interpreter when she was questioned by the police.
It was common ground that the applicant’s level of Turkish was such that the services of an interpreter had been required.
Further, although the applicant had been assisted by an interpreter at the hearing before the judge responsible for ruling on pre-trial detention, this had not been the case when she was questioned by the gendarmes when she stated that she had found the document in question on the floor of the prison waiting room thereby admitting that a document had indeed been found in her possession.
Without the possibility of having the questions put to her interpreted, and of forming as accurate an idea as possible of the alleged offences, the applicant had not been able to appreciate fully the consequences of her alleged waiver of her rights to keep silent and to legal assistance and, in consequence, of the whole range of services specifically associated with legal assistance. It was therefore legitimate to question whether the choices the applicant had made without access to an interpreter had been fully informed. In the Court’s view, this initial shortcoming had thus affected other rights which, while distinct from that in respect of which a violation was alleged, were closely related to it and had compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole.
While it was true that the applicant had been assisted by an interpreter at the hearing before a judge at the close of police custody, this fact could not remedy the defect which had vitiated the proceedings in the initial stages. In addition, it appeared that the judge had not sought to verify the skills of the interpreter, who was just a member of the applicant’s family who happened to be present in the corridor. Furthermore, although the trial judges had based her conviction on a range of evidence, it remained the case that the statements obtained without the assistance of an interpreter while she was in police custody had also served as a basis for the conviction.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41: EUR 1,500 in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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