Information Note on the Court’s case-law 203
January 2017
Bodet v. Belgium - 78480/13
Decision 5.1.2017 [Section II]
Article 6
Criminal proceedings
Article 6-1
Impartial tribunal
Alleged lack of impartiality of juror owing to comments she made in newspaper interview after sentencing: inadmissible
Facts – In 2012, by two judgments of the same date, an assize court convicted the applicant of the premediated murder of his partner’s daughter, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Two days later, a regional daily newspaper published an interview with a member of the court’s lay jury, whose identity was not given. The interviewee allegedly stated that (i) she could not but put herself in the place of the victim’s mother; (ii) she wished to pay tribute to the work of the investigators, who, by drawing up a precise timeline, had removed the doubts of the majority of jurors and refuted the defence arguments; and (iii) she had wanted to “thump [the applicant]” when he spoke.
Law – Article 6 § 1: Statements made about a case or the parties involved by a member of the entity judging the case, whether these were made before, during or after the trial, were capable of indicating the existence of bias on its part. The question of whether or not these statements constituted sufficient evidence of a lack of subjective or objective impartiality depended on the context and the content of the comments in issue. In the present case, the following elements led to the conclusion that the applicant’s fears were not objectively justified.
(a) Subjective impartiality – The impugned comments had been made subsequent to the verdict, that is, at a point when the juror concerned no longer had a jurisdictional role. The legal provisions in place to ensure the jury’s impartiality no longer applied as such, but had been replaced by those banning any violation of the secrecy of the deliberations. The applicant did not allege that the juror in question had externalised any opinion or emotion during the trial. Nor had he requested that any juror be discharged during the trial.
Although the impugned comments did indeed reflect a negative perception of the defendant’s case, it could not be deduced from the interview as a whole that the juror in question had begun the trial with a preconceived idea about the applicant’s guilt, but rather that this conviction had developed over the course of the trial. Furthermore, the article contained elements which could indicate the opposite conclusion (the juror had indicated that the investigators’ work and the precise timeline drawn up by them had been of great assistance to the jury, and then referred to the deliberations).
(b) Objective impartiality – As to the composition of the assize court, Belgian law provided that a lay jury was made up of twelve members. It deliberated alone on the question of the defendant’s guilt. Three professional judges joined the jury to formulate the reasons for the decision and to discuss together the sentence to be imposed.
The applicant had not advanced any concrete argument capable of casting doubt on the capacity of the assize court, a collegial judicial bench, to form an opinion with complete impartiality, this element. That opinion had been formed at the close of the deliberations and had then taken tangible shape in the form of two reasoned decisions which did not appear arbitrary.
Conclusion: inadmissible (manifestly ill-founded).
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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