FIRST SECTION
DECISION
AS TO THE ADMISSIBILITY OF
Application no. 72839/01
by Valeriy Ivanovich KARYAGIN
against Russia
The European Court of Human Rights (First Section), sitting on 23 October 2007 as a Chamber composed of:
MrL. Loucaides, President,
MrsN. Vajić,
MrA. Kovler,
MrsE. Steiner,
MrD. Spielmann,
MrS.E. Jebens,
MrG. Malinverni, judges,
and Mr S. Nielsen, Section Registrar,
Having regard to the above application lodged on 11 January 2001,
Having regard to the observations submitted by the respondent Government and the observations in reply submitted by the applicant,
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
THE FACTS
The applicant, Mr Valeriy Ivanovich Karyagin, is a Russian national who was born in 1955 and lives in Magnitogorsk. The Russian Government (“the Government”) were represented by Mr P. Laptev, Representative of the Russian Federation at the European Court of Human Rights.
The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.
On 5 February 1998 the Chelyabinsk Regional Court convicted the applicant of aiding and abetting bribe-takers and sentenced him to nine years’ imprisonment. On 19 February 1998 the court sent the judgment to the remand prison where the applicant was detained. The judgment, which counted 27 pages, was handed to the applicant.
Having studied the judgment, the applicant drafted an appeal and on 26 February 1998 lodged it with the Regional Court. In his appeal the applicant denied that he had committed the offences and claimed that there had been no proper evidence of his guilt. On 16 June 1998 the Regional Court forwarded the appeal and the case file to the Supreme Court for examination. On 8 September 1998 the applicant lodged an additional detailed appeal requesting to quash the judgment.
On 14 October 1998 the Supreme Court examined the case. It held that the finding of the applicant’s guilt had been corroborated by statements of victims and witnesses, expert reports, the applicant’s own statements and other evidence. By a decision of 14 October 1998 the Supreme Court reclassified the applicant’s actions in respect of one of the episodes imputed to him as an attempted crime and upheld his conviction for the remainder.
In April 2000 the applicant learned that, in fact, there had been two different versions of the judgment: the one in the case file was not the same as the one pronounced on 5 February 1998. The applicant asked the Regional Court to send him the judgment from the case file.
When the applicant received the judgment on 23 October 2000, he discovered that it counted 31 pages, i.e. it was four pages longer than the judgment that he had received in the remand prison and had appealed against. He identified around 200 changes in total.
On 26 December 2000 the applicant complained to the Presidium of the Supreme Court about this discrepancy. He asked the court to exercise its power of supervisory review and quash the judgment.
On 31 May 2001 the Supreme Court replied that the examination carried out at the Chelyabinsk Regional Court had revealed that the 27-page version of the judgment had not been signed by the judge and was a forgery. The Supreme Court further stated that there was no reason to reopen the case.
On 17 March 2003 the applicant was released on parole.
COMPLAINT
The applicant complained that his trial had been unfair and his imprisonment had been unlawful because the judgment he had appealed against was not the same as the judgment the Supreme Court had examined on appeal. He referred to various Convention provisions including Articles 5 § 1 (a) and 6 §§ 1, 2 and 3 (b). He alleged that the judge had changed the judgment after the trial and had sent the modified version to the Supreme Court.
THE LAW
Relying on Articles 5 § 1 (a) and 6 §§ 1, 2 and 3 (b), and other provisions of the Convention, the applicant complained that the fact that the judgment he had appealed against was different from the judgment examined by the appeal court had deprived him of the possibility of preparing his appeal properly, and that he had therefore been unlawfully convicted and deprived of his liberty as a result of an unfair trial.
Bearing in mind that the requirements of paragraph 3 (b) of Article 6 are specific aspects of the right to a fair trial, as guaranteed under paragraph 1 of Article 6, the Court considers that the applicant’s complaint falls to be examined under these two provisions taken together (see, among other authorities, Hadjianastassiou v. Greece, judgment of 16 December 1992, Series A no. 252, p. 16, § 31). These provisions, in so far as relevant, read as follows:
“1. In the determination of ... any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair ... hearing ... by [a] ... tribunal...
...
3. Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the following minimum rights:
...
(b) to have adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence;
...”
The Government made the following submissions, referring to information obtained from the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Federal Service for the Execution of Sentences.
The applicant’s case file contained three copies of the judgment of the Chelyabinsk Regional Court of 5 February 1998. One copy was handwritten and the two others were typed, one totalling 27 pages and the other totalling 31 pages. The two typed copies were “identical as to content” and the different number of pages could be explained by larger interlinear spacing and different paragraph formatting. There were small discrepancies caused by “technical mistakes” because both copies had been typed manually. Those “insignificant formal discrepancies [were] of a purely technical nature and [did] not influence the essence of the sentence”.
The Government concluded that the applicant’s right to a fair hearing guaranteed by Article 6 of the Convention had not been violated and that the application should be rejected as manifestly ill-founded.
The applicant contested the Government’s submissions. He argued that the 31-page copy of the judgment contained 241 more words than the 27‑page copy, and that there were 207 discrepancies between the two texts, about a half of which concerned the circumstances of the case, the evidence and the court’s conclusions, while the other half concerned grammatical and stylistic changes which were mostly aimed to facilitate the understanding of the text. The applicant claimed that the 27-page copy had preceded the 31‑page copy as all the grammatical and stylistic errors which could be found in the 27-page copy had been corrected in the 31-page copy.
He further submitted that the criminal procedure did not permit any changes to a judgment after its public pronouncement. Before signing each copy of the judgment, the judge should have verified that it had been identical to the original copy but had apparently failed to do so.
The Court considers, in the light of the parties’ submissions, that the application raises serious issues of fact and law under the Convention, the determination of which requires an examination of the merits. The Court concludes therefore that the application is not manifestly ill-founded within the meaning of Article 35 § 3 of the Convention. No other ground for declaring it inadmissible has been established.
For these reasons, the Court by a majority
Declares the application admissible, without prejudging the merits of the case.
Søren NielsenLoukis Loucaides
RegistrarPresident
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy