Information Note on the Court’s case-law 38
January 2002
Turquin v. France (dec.) - 43467/98
Decision 24.1.2002 [Section II]
Article 6
Criminal proceedings
Article 6-1
Fair hearing
Use at trial of private recordings made without the knowledge of the accused: inadmissible
The applicant reported the disappearance of his young son to the police. An inquiry into his domestic circumstances revealed that he and his wife had begun divorce proceedings and that relations between them were strained. It emerged from the inquiry that there may have been an abduction by a member of the family and a judicial investigation was consequently started on that basis. The applicant’s wife, who had joined the proceedings as a civil party, produced recordings of conversations with the applicant to the investigating judge. They had been made without the applicant’s knowledge and contained an admission by him that he had killed their son. A transcript of the recordings was lodged on the case file. The applicant was then charged with murder and detained pending trial. He alleged that the recording was a fabrication, but that suggestion was refuted by an expert. The applicant then acknowledged that the recording was genuine but sought to justify what he had said by the course the conversation with his wife had taken, implying that his words did not reflect the truth but had been a strategy aimed at getting her to come back to live with him. The applicant was committed to stand trial before an assize court on a charge of premeditated murder by the indictment division of the court of appeal after it had dismissed his application for the procedural documents referring to the recordings made by the civil party to be declared invalid. The applicant’s appeal against the committal order was dismissed. He lodged a criminal complaint against his wife concerning the recordings that had been made without his knowledge and handed over to the authorities, but to no avail. Meanwhile, even though the child’s body had not been found he was convicted and sentenced to twenty-years’ imprisonment. He lodged an appeal without success to the Court of Cassation, arguing notably that the assize court had refused to admit in evidence cassettes from separate proceedings which would have supported the defence case.
Inadmissible under Article 6 § 1: the national courts had not considered the recording to have been obtained in violation of the applicant’s right to private life: on the contrary, they regarded it as relevant to the determination of the truth in criminal proceedings. The fact that there were no rules of domestic law governing the admissibility of evidence produced by the parties to proceedings and that that evidence constituted the basis on which the judges reached their verdict, was not in itself incompatible with the requirements of Article 6 § 1, in that it appeared that the applicant had at no stage denied the content of the recording, had been given various opportunities to make representations during questioning and had been able to lodge with the court the observations he considered necessary regarding the authenticity of the recording and the use made of it. The recording had been authenticated by an expert, the court had answered the applicant’s arguments and, lastly, the applicant had not made any observation or claim regarding the authenticity of the recording when it was produced in evidence before the assize court. For those reasons, the applicant had been convicted after adversarial process. It also had to be noted that the recording was not the only evidence the judge and jury had before them when reaching their verdict in their unfettered discretion. Further, the assize court’s decision not to grant the applicant’s request for an adjournment of the case had not been arbitrary: 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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