The applicant – Władysław Jamroży – was arrested on 27 May 2002 by the Central Bureau of Investigation (Centralne Biuro Śledcze) on suspicion of having committed fraud. The Warsaw District Court remanded the applicant in custody in view of the reasonable suspicion that he had committed the offences. Subsequently, further decisions extending the applicant’s detention were taken by the Warsaw District Court. Warsaw District Court lifted the applicant’s detention and released him on bail in August 2004 (he spent two years, two months and twenty-two days in detention). His criminal case in Poland is still pending before the first-instance court. The applicant complained that the length of his detention on remand had been excessive. The European Court of Human Rights decided that there has been a violation of Article 5 § 3 of the Convention.
The comments submitted by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights were limited only to the question of the existence in Poland of the structural problem relating to the application of pre-trial detention. The Foundation first submitted some 2001-2007 statistics, according to which approximately 90% of all prosecutor’s requests for pre-trial detention were allowed by the courts. Each year this preventive measure was applied in approximately forty thousand cases. The institution of pre-trial detention in Poland was abused, with serious social and financial consequences for remand prisoners and serious financial consequences for the State Treasury.
Secondly, the Foundation, examining the particular grounds for pre trial detention usually relied on by domestic authorities ordering or extending pre-trial detention, went on to say that these grounds were not always exhaustively examined and justified; in most cases the authorities simply limited themselves to repeating the wording of the Code of Criminal Procedure’s relevant provisions. By way of example, the domestic courts often relied on the risk that the defendant might abscond. In their view, this risk was usually justified by the severity of the expected sentence. The Foundation stressed that the risk of absconding must be assessed with reference to a number of other relevant factors which may either confirm the existence of a danger of absconding or make it appear so slight that it cannot justify pre-trial detention.
The Foundation also pointed to the rarity of cases in which consideration had been given to other, less severe, preventive measures such as bail, personal guarantees or police supervision. It further referred to a number of provisions of Polish law influencing irregularities in the application of pre-trial detention such as insufficient independence of prosecutors vis-à-vis their supervisors, the fact that decisions extending detention were taken by assistant judges, the fact that court hearings at which pre-trial detention was ordered or extended were practically closed to the public, the limited access to relevant documents allowed to remand prisoners and their representatives and the limited possibility of having pre-trial detention cases examined by the Supreme Court. The Foundation concluded that in their opinion the abuse of pre-trial detention in Poland amounted to a structural problem.
The amicus curiae is available here (in English).
Recently, in the case of Kauczor v. Poland the Court held that the number of judgments already delivered and of the pending cases raising an issue of excessive detention incompatible with Article 5 § 3 demonstrated that the violation of the applicant’s right under Article 5 § 3 of the Convention had originated in a widespread problem of the Polish criminal justice system.
In the present case, as in other numerous similar detention cases, the authorities did not justify the applicant’s continued detention by relevant and sufficient reasons. Consequently, the Court sees no reason to diverge from its findings made in Kauczor as to the existence of a structural problem and the need for the Polish State to adopt measures to remedy the situation.
