Pretpostavka nevinosti i Evropski sud za ljudska prava
Presumption of Innocence and the European Court on Human Rights

Author(s): Jovan Ćirić
Subject(s): Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Politics and law, EU-Legislation
Published by: Institut za uporedno pravo
Keywords: presumption of innocence; European Court on Human Rights; burden of proof; media manipulations;
Summary/Abstract: For one autocratic regime, everyone, a priori is guilty, or at least suspicious, so that guilty man has to proove the opposite and it is impossible. But, in democratic regimes the situation is quite an opposite, the state has to prove someone’s gult. It is always very duficult to prove that someone is innocence, in logical, psychological, sociological or any other sense. It is the question of the burden of proof. The burden of proof is always on the side of the state if we want to talk about fair, democratic trial. In that sense the presumption of innocence is something that is typical for democratic regimes, for respecting human rights, for impartial judicial trials without prejudices, for something that is called „fair trial“.In the second paragraf, of the article 6 of European Convention on Human Rights, („fair trial“) it is said that everybody is innocent, untill the state prove the opposite, i.e. everobody has to be treated innocent if there is no the adequate judicial decission that say an opposite. That paragraf is short, but the significance, and especially the interpretation of theese words are very wide. We also must have in mind that the violation of the presumption of innocence nowdays could be demonstrated on many different ways, in spite of all proclamation about human rights and democracy. Media manipulation is one of possible ways for violating the presumption of innocence. The European Court on Human Rights explicitly speaks about that in some of it’s decissions. In that sense, the author of this article presents here some very interesting decissions of the European Court On Human Rights in Strasbourg, when the word was about the violation of the presumption of innocence, that is guaranteed by the article 6 par.2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Those decissions and interpretations of the presumption of innocence are very interesting and very important for Serbian law and establishing democratic practice in Serbian judiciary.

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