CEDH · CASELAW;CLIN;ENG — 7 mars 2002

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Denmark (dec.) - 49126/99 Decision 7.3.2002 [Section I] Article 6 Criminal proceedings Article 6-1 Reasonable time Allegedly excessive length of proceedings concerning fraud, due to the joinder of the cases against several defendants: inadmissible Article 34 Victim Court allegedly refraining from increasing applicant’s sentence after having taking into account length of proceedings The applicant was managing director of finance of a holding company, NFHA, the ultimate holding company of a holding group composed of over fifty companies throughout the world. In 1991 NFHA went bankrupt. The applicant, three other top executives of NFHA and three accountants were prosecuted. Investigations were carried out in eleven countries and accountants were requested to draw up the statements of account of NFHA from 1985 to 1990. The trial began in November 1994 and lasted more than 14 months. In August 1996 the City Court gave a two-hundred-page judgment convicting the applicant and sentencing him to two years’ imprisonment. He was also ordered to pay costs of 400,000 kroner (DKK). He appealed. The trial in the High Court started in November 1997 and lasted almost 10 months, ending with a judgment in which the sentence was confirmed, although the costs were reduced. The applicant complained that Article 6 § 1 of the Convention had been violated due to the length of the proceedings but the High Court found that 7 years and 7 months for a case of such complexity and size did not amount to a violation of Article 6 § 1. Furthermore, it approved the prosecution’s decision to join the cases against the defendants, the aim being to reduce court costs. The court acknowledged that joining the cases might have unduly prolonged the proceedings for some of the defendants; it found that this was the case for the three accountants but not for the applicant and the three others. As to the applicant’s sentence,   the court agreed with the findings of the City Court, emphasising that the fraud was a serious one. The Leave to Appeal Board rejected the applicant’s request for leave to appeal against the High Court’s judgment. Inadmissible under Article 6 § 1: (i) victim status – The fact that the High Court expressly rejected the applicant’s claim that the proceedings had exceeded a “reasonable time” could hardly comply with the requirement that the national authorities should acknowledge either expressly or in substance a violation of the Convention. Although the High Court abstained from increasing the applicant’s sentence, despite finding that the fraud was serious and that there were few mitigating circumstances, it expressly stated that it agreed entirely with the City Court’s reasoning. Moreover, it remained unclear how much of the reduction of the costs decided by the High Court was attributable to the length of the proceedings alone. Therefore, it could not be considered that the High Court had acknowledged in a sufficiently clear manner a failure to comply with the reasonable time requirement. It was not convincingly established that the national authorities had afforded redress by reducing the sentence in an express and measurable manner or by exempting the applicant from paying an amount of costs which could have constituted redress. Accordingly, the applicant could claim to be a victim. (ii) As to the length of the proceedings, they had lasted almost 7 years and 10 months. The case was undoubtedly of a complex nature. However, the facts of the case did not disclose that the investigating authorities or the prosecution had acted inappropriately or otherwise failed to undertake their duties with due diligence. As to the prosecution’s decision to join the investigations and the trials in respect of the applicant and the other defendants in order to reduce court costs, the charges against the applicant related to his role as managing director of finance of a large holding company and the defendants were top executives and accountants of this company; their roles were therefore interconnected. The High Court took this aspect into account when assessing the “reasonable time” requirement. Furthermore, evidence concerning the general structure of the company and its accounting practices were relevant to all defendants. For these reasons, the decision to join these cases appeared appropriate. Although the proceedings before the City Court, the High Court and the Board of leave to appeal lasted five years and more than two months, there were no periods of inactivity such as to make them unduly lengthy. In conclusion, the overall length of the proceedings did not go beyond what could be considered reasonable in the particular circumstances of the case: manifestly ill-founded.   © Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court. Click here for the Case-Law Information Notes