#cases #freedom-of-person #human-rights #public

Murray (John) v UK (1996 ) 22 EHRR 29

Facts: Murray was arrested, detained and later convicted of a terrorism-related offence in Northern Ireland. For the first 48 hours of his detention he had been denied access to legal advice and, on conviction, he was told that adverse inferences had been drawn from his refusal to answer police questions after his arrest. Murray complained to the Strasbourg Court that the combination of lack of legal advice and the drawing of the inferences by the criminal court had deprived him of a fair trial and legal process.
The findings in this case reveal some important features about the nature of Article 6 protection and the application of the proportionality test in this area. Even though the applicant strongly argued that the drawing of adverse inferences was in itself contrary to the spirit of Article 6(2) in particular, the court did not look at his claim in this absolutist way. Instead the judges assessed whether there was a justification, permitted by the law, for partial restriction of the ‘right’ to silence and against self-incrimination and decided that in the particular circumstances there was, especially as the applicant had been cautioned at the start of the process about the possibility of adverse inferences being drawn. However, the applicant was successful in his claim relating to the restriction of access to legal advice in the very important first stage of the criminal process following arrest. The court clearly thought that this applicant and criminal defendants generally are particularly vulnerable to possible abuse of process at this early stage and found that there had been a breach of Article 6(1) taken together with Article 6(3)(c) in these circumstances, irrespective of how a lawyer may have advised in the first place.