Proceedings in the Supreme Court Clausole campione

Proceedings in the Supreme Court. 30. The applicants appealed on points of law, relying on Articles 14 (right of all Spaniards to equality before the law), 17 (right to liberty and security of person) and 24 (right to effective xxxx- cial protection) of the Constitution. They described the circumstances of their arrest and custody and pointed out that when they were questioned by the police they did not have the assistance of lawyers and had not been informed of their rights; they had made confessions only because use had been made of coercion, threats and ill-treatment (see paragraphs 19-20 above). They also claimed that there was no evidence to rebut the presumption that they were innocent of Mr Xxxxx’x murder, as the physical violence to which they had been subjected rendered their con- fessions invalid. Moreover, there was no connection between the facts found by the Audiencia Na- cional and the evidence adduced before it, and its judgment did not explain how it had arrived at its decision. The applicants also criticised the Audiencia Nacional for not having determined all the issues raised in the defence submissions (Article 851 para. 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure - see paragraph 43 below): it had ignored their allegations that their statements to the police were inva lid and had given no indication of the evidential value it attached to those statements, having regard to the material produced during the trial. Mr Xxxxxxxx submitted, moreover, that he was implicated solely by confessions extracted by force from Mr Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx, who had later retracted them before the judge; the Audiencia Nacional had again not expressed an opinion as to their validity. Furthermore, the Audiencia Nacional had made an error of fact in assessing the evidence (Article 849 para. 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure - see paragraph 42 below), because there was no conclusive evidence to refute their protestations of innocence before the judge. Referring to Article 24 para. 2 of the Constitution (see paragraph 36 below), which enshrines the principle of the pre- xxxxxxxx of innocence, and to the Supreme Court’s case-law on the subject, the applicants asserted that not only had the evidence been wrongly evaluated but no such evidence in fact existed. They further submitted that the Audiencia Nacional had not indicated its reasons for holding that the facts had been established, as required by Supreme Court precedents, even though the main de- fence submission had been that there was no evidence. Ther...

Proceedings in the Supreme Court. 27. The applicants filed appeals on points of law (xxxxxxxx) to the Supreme Court (Hoge Raad). In accordance with the advisory opinion of the advocate-general, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals in a series of judgments of 9 June 1992. It held that in the circumstances the evidence given by the unnamed police officers was admissible, since on the one hand their evidence was suf- ficiently corroborated by the evidence obtained from named sources and on the other the procedure followed provided sufficient compensation for the handicaps under which the defence had la- boured. The Supreme Court’s judgments concerning Mr Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx and Mr van Xxxxxxxx were re- ported in Nederlandse Jurisprudentie (Netherlands Law Reports, “NJ”) 1992, nos. 772 and 773 re- spectively.