The European Commission is unhappy with the implementation of the 2016 Directive on the presumption of innocence in criminal proceedings (see EUROPE 11472/4). In an evaluation report published on Wednesday 31 March, it states that it will not hesitate to pursue ongoing infringement proceedings.
Member States had until 1 April 2018 to transpose the Directive into national law. By that date, 11 Member States had not communicated all the necessary measures to the Commission. As a result, by May 2018, the Commission had opened infringement proceedings against these Member States.
Since then, most of them have fulfilled this obligation and the infringement proceedings have been dropped. However, following completeness checks, four infringement proceedings are still open on the grounds that some provisions of the Directive have not yet been transposed. In addition, new infringement proceedings for partial disclosure were opened in February 2021 against Estonia, Finland and Poland.
In its report, the Commission states that it will, as a matter of priority, pursue open infringement proceedings, but will also continue to assess compliance with the directive and take all appropriate measures to ensure compliance in the EU.
The transposition of the Directive’s provisions on the prohibition of public references to guilt seems particularly problematic.
There are only six Member States whose legislation fully complies with this provision, which stipulates that Member States must take the necessary measures to ensure that public statements by public authorities as well as judicial decisions do not portray a suspect or accused person as guilty until proven guilty according to law.
Compliance problems were found in 19 Member States, according to the report. In some countries, these problems result from the lack of transposition and, in 13 Member States, from the more limited scope of national provisions, which do not cover all public authorities or all procedural steps or do not include judicial decisions.
See the report: https://bit.ly/2PNW2Os (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)