The consequence of an overwhelmed justice? In recent weeks, two court cases have simply been canceled by the Rouen Criminal Court (Seine-Maritime) for violation of the principle that everyone has the right to be tried within a “reasonable time”.
The first case, a pimping case whose facts dated back to 2012, was to be tried on February 22, but the court considered that the length of the proceedings was unreasonable, in particular because there was no particular complexity and that all of the defendants had participated in the proceedings. “Rebelote, March 8, in a case of fraud and association of criminals in an organized gang”, reports Paris Normandy. Again, the alleged facts date back to 2012.
A deceased defendant, another quadriplegic
If the prosecution has announced to appeal, this slowness is such that in one of the files, “a defendant became quadriplegic after a car accident and in the other, one of the defendants died”, tells 20 Minutes Me Patrick Chabert, one of the defense lawyers. Above all, he sees in these two decisions “a sign given to the chancellery that this cannot go on any longer”. Moreover, the lawyers have changed, some have retired, which is difficult in these conditions to ensure a fair defence. These “unreasonable delays prevent confrontation” and create an “impossibility of exercising the right to defense”, pleads Me Alexis Julia, counsel in the two cases.
To raise the issue of the unreasonable delay in judgment, the lawyers relied, among other things, on Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights which states that “everyone has the right to have his case heard fairly, publicly and within a reasonable time.
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