Saunders V United Kingdom - Judgment - European Court of Human Rights

European Court of Human Rights

By a majority of 16-4 the ECtHR found that there was a breach of Article 6. The court rejected the argument of the British government that the complexity of large fraud cases and the public interest in securing a conviction justified the compulsion; the court also rejected the argument that power of a trial judge to exclude admissions was a defence in this case. The court stated that "the public interest cannot be invoked to justify the use of answers compulsorily obtained in a non-judicial investigation to incriminate the accused during the trial proceedings" and "the prosecution in a criminal case seek to prove their case against the accused without resort to evidence obtained through methods of coercion or oppression in defiance of the will of the accused." Saunders was awarded damages of £75,000, which was paid in June 1997.

But this was tempered by: " does not extend to the use in criminal proceedings of material which may be obtained from the accused through the use of compulsory powers but which has an existence independent of the will of the suspect such as, inter alia, documents acquired pursuant to a warrant, breath, blood and urine samples and bodily tissue for the purpose of DNA testing." The court also stated that " whether the right not to incriminate oneself is absolute or whether infringements of it may be justified in particular circumstances."

One of the dissenting judges (Mr. S. K. Martens) pointed out that the court was, in effect, over-ruling the judgement made in Funke v. France, in that it found the prosecution's use of answers given by the defendant unfair, but that the use of documents obtained from the defendant by compulsion was acceptable.

While the judgement appeared decisive the caveats reduced its impact on English law as the majority of affected statutes do not contain any ambiguity over the treatment of information given under compulsory examination. Section 434 was amended in a Schedule to the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999. When Saunders was returned to the Court of Appeals it was held that the wording of section 434 did not allow for the exclusion of evidence solely on the grounds it was obtained under compulsion (R v. Saunders (1996) 1 Cr. App. R. 463), it was confirmed that "Parliament's clear intention... must defeat Convention jurisprudence." Further in British law Brown v. Stott (2003) allowed the admission of answers obtained by compulsory questioning under section 172 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, apparently in direct opposition to the ECtHR's ruling.

During the ECtHR's deliberations the following case law was considered Deweer v. Belgium, Funke v. France, Fayed v. United Kingdom, John Murray v. United Kingdom.