Background
The applicants were prosecuted over the operation of a Romanian fertility clinic that offered ova-donation procedures. Female donors had signed documents describing payments of 800 Romanian lei as compensation for medical-investigation and travel costs. During the criminal investigation, most donors stated that they had donated ova for monetary compensation, although some did not confirm those accounts when testifying at trial.
Several judges successively presided over the first-instance proceedings. Judge A.M.M., who ultimately convicted the applicants and sentenced each to five years’ imprisonment, had not heard the applicants or the prosecution witnesses whose statements were central to the judgment. The Bucharest Court of Appeal admitted no new evidence but upheld the first and second applicants’ convictions, narrowed the third applicant’s conviction, and reduced the sentences to three years. The High Court of Cassation and Justice dismissed their appeals on points of law without expressly addressing their complaint that the principle of immediacy had been breached.
The Court’s Holding
The European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that the proceedings violated Article 6 because of a breach of the principle of immediacy. Although Judge A.M.M. had transcripts of the earlier hearings, the prosecution witnesses’ accounts were crucial to the convictions, contained discrepancies, and raised credibility concerns because the donors had initially been questioned as suspects. In those circumstances, effective respect for immediacy required the deciding judge to hear them again.
Neither appellate level supplied adequate counterbalancing safeguards: the Court of Appeal decided the factual and legal issues without taking new evidence, and the High Court heard no witnesses or expressly addressed the immediacy argument. The Court therefore found that reliance on the witnesses’ statements without their direct examination by the deciding judge, coupled with the absence of safeguards remedying the resulting disadvantage, deprived the applicants of a fair trial. It found no need to rule separately on their other Article 6 complaints. It rejected the Article 7 complaint as manifestly ill-founded, concluding that the domestic courts’ treatment of trafficking in human cells as a serious offence under the organised-crime legislation was reasonably foreseeable and consistent with the essence of the offence.
Key Takeaways
- When a trial judge is replaced after an important witness has testified, the witness should normally be reheard by the judge who will decide the case.
- Whether failure to rehear testimony makes proceedings unfair depends on the testimony’s significance, any credibility disputes, and the presence or absence of counterbalancing safeguards.
- The Court awarded EUR 7,800 each to the first and second applicants, EUR 7,800 jointly to the third applicant’s successors, and EUR 10,400 jointly for costs and expenses.
Why It Matters
The judgment underscores that immediacy is especially important when a conviction depends heavily on witness accounts whose credibility is disputed. Access to transcripts may not suffice where the deciding judge did not personally hear crucial testimony and later proceedings do not cure that disadvantage.
The ruling is context-specific rather than a categorical prohibition on relying on a written record. The Court assessed the proceedings as a whole, focusing on the witnesses’ central role, inconsistencies in their accounts, their earlier status as suspects, and the lack of adequate safeguards at the appellate stages.