Staines v. the United Kingdom (dec.)

Information Note on the Court’s case-law 18

May 2000

Staines v. the United Kingdom (dec.) - 41552/98

Decision 16.5.2000 [Section III]

Article 6

Article 6-2

Presumption of innocence

Use by prosecution of statements made by accused under legal compulsion: inadmissible

The applicant, a chartered accountant, was convicted of illegal share dealing practices. The applicant had a meal with another chartered accountant, P., whose firm was involved in a take-over bid of a company. In this context, P. was considered, according to law, a connected person in possession of unpublished price-sensitive information. Shortly after the meal, the applicant advised her father to buy shares in the company which was the subject of the take-over bid. A few years later, inspectors from the Department of Trade and Industry were appointed to investigate share dealings of the company. The applicant voluntarily provided the inspectors with a written statement in which she stated that in the course of their meal P. had disclosed no information which made it possible to deduce which company was being targeted for the take-over bid; she confirmed this during a subsequent informal interview. The applicant was then summoned to a formal interview during which she was obliged under the Financial Services Act 1986 to answer the inspectors’ questions under oath;  she adhered to the accounts given in her voluntary written and oral statements. At her subsequent trial, the applicant relied on the statements made to the inspectors, including the last one, and did not testify. She was eventually found guilty. The Court of Appeal dismissed her appeal and she was refused leave to appeal to the House of Lords.

Inadmissible under Article 6 § 1 and § 2: The right not incriminate oneself presupposes that the prosecution in a criminal case seeks to prove its case against the accused without resort to evidence obtained through methods of coercion or oppression in defiance of the will of the accused. In the instant case, the applicant was obliged under the Financial Services Act 1986 to attend before the inspectors when summoned and to answer questions put to her under oath. However, by that stage, the applicant had already provided unsolicited statements to the inspectors. She was consistent all through her statements in her assertion that no information making it possible to identify the company had been disclosed at the material time. The applicant did not object to the prosecution’s reliance on the statements which she had given under oath; on the contrary, she relied on them to establish in the eyes of the jury an unwavering line of defence to the charges brought against her. Testimony obtained under compulsion which appears on its face to be of a non-incriminating nature, such as exculpatory remarks or mere information on questions of facts, may later be employed in criminal proceedings in support of the prosecution case, for example to contradict or cast doubt upon other statements of the accused. However, it does not appear that the prosecution relied on the statements which the applicant gave to the inspectors under oath in a manner calculated to incriminate her. On the contrary, these statements were treated as one element of an overall defence case and the prosecution attempted to expose the weakness of the applicant’s line of defence. It did so without any unjustified recourse to evidence which could be said to have been obtained in defiance of the applicant’s will or was at variance with her right to be presumed innocent: 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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