European Court of Human Rights Rules Delaying Access to Lawyers in Police Questioning did not Violate Suspects’ Rights (December 16, 2014) [1]
On December 16, 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) ruled [3] in Ibrahim and Others v. The United Kingdom that British police did not violate Article 6 (right to a fair trial) of the European Convention on Human Rights [4] (the Convention) when they did not allow suspects in an attempted train bombing access to their lawyers while police searched for the suspects’ accomplices immediately after the attempt. According to the press release [5], the Court ruled that, due to the interviews being “conducted urgently for the purpose of protecting life and preventing serious damage to property . . . no undue prejudice had been caused to the applicants’ right to a fair trial as a result of the failure to provide access to a lawyer” during the initial “safety interviews.” The Court cited the U.K.’s Terrorism Act of 2000 [6], which “struck an appropriate balance between the importance of the right to legal advice and the pressing need in exceptional cases to enable the police to obtain information necessary to protect the public.”