FIFTH SECTION
CASE OF ZADEH v. THE CZECH REPUBLIC
(Applications nos. 35207/17 and 6 others)
 
 
 
 
JUDGMENT
 
STRASBOURG
27 June 2024
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This judgment is final but it may be subject to editorial revision. In the case of Zadeh v. the Czech Republic,
The European Court of Human Rights (Fifth Section), sitting as a Committee composed of:
 Lado Chanturia, President,
 Stéphanie Mourou-Vikström,
 Mykola Gnatovskyy, judges,
and Martina Keller, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to:
the applications against the Czech Republic lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) on the various dates indicated in Appendix by the applicant, Mr Shahram Zadeh, a Czech and Iranian citizen (“the applicant”), who was born in 1971, lives in Prague and was represented by Zdenek Koudelka, a lawyer practising in Brno;
the decision to give notice of the complaints concerning the excessive length of his pre-trial detention, the lack of speediness of the review of the lawfulness thereof and the inspection by the prison authorities of documents exchanged with his lawyers to the Czech Government (“the Government”) represented by their Agent, and to declare inadmissible the remainder of the applications;
the parties’ observations;
the comments submitted by the Czech Bar Association, who were granted leave to intervene by the President of the Section;
Having deliberated in private on 6 June 2024,
Delivers the following judgment, which was adopted on that date:
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
1. The case concerns complaints under Articles 5 §§ 3 and 4 and Article 8 of the Convention. 2. The complaints were lodged in the context of criminal proceedings initiated in the Czech Republic in March 2014 against the applicant and fourteen other persons on suspicion of having committed particularly serious crimes of tax evasion and of membership of an organised criminal group. On 19 March 2014 the applicant was arrested and subsequently placed in pre‑trial detention where he remained until 4 February 2016, the date of his release on bail. 3. On 2 December 2016 the applicant was again taken into custody in the framework of a new set of criminal proceedings initiated following his attempts, together with five other persons, to influence witnesses and to discredit officials involved in the examination of his first case. On 2 March 2017 the investigation in this case was completed. On 28 April 2017 the prosecutor decided that the risk of interfering with witnesses no longer existed. The trial started in November 2017. The applicant remained in detention until his conviction on 5 March 2019 by the Brno Municipal Court, subsequently modified on appeal. The applicant was convicted and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. 4. During this period, the applicant’s pre-trial detention was reviewed eight times by the domestic courts, including by the Constitutional Court. The domestic courts referred to the persistence of grounds for his detention based on reasonable suspicion that he committed the offences he was prosecuted for. They also referred to the risk of absconding resulting from the severity of the penalty faced by the applicant in both sets of proceedings, his connections with several other countries and substantial financial means as well as to the risk of re-offending on account of his previous documented attempts to interfere with the investigation in his first case after he was released on bail and of his tactics aimed at delaying the proceedings by all possible means. In their latest decisions, they referred to the Court’s case-law that the grounds for detention weakened with the passage of time but observed that, in this particular case, the grounds for the applicant’s detention had strengthened given the number of criminal proceedings he was facing. They further considered that alternative measures were inadequate to prevent these risks, notably in view of the applicant’s connections with other countries and the nature and the extent of his criminal activity. They consequently rejected his repeated offers regarding the possible application of more lenient preventive measures. On 12 March 2019 the Constitutional Court conceded that the proceedings were of an exceptional duration but found that this duration was justified by the complexity of the case, the large number of defendants, the amount of damage caused and by numerous procedural motions, requests and objections repeatedly presented by the defence. 5. By a judgment delivered on 29 October 2021 the Brno Regional Court approved the plea-bargaining agreement concluded by the applicant with the prosecution. According to that judgment, the applicant committed a particularly serious crime of evading taxes and other similar mandatory payments and of membership of an organised criminal group. 6. As regards the alleged inspection by the prison authorities of documents, notes and correspondence from his lawyers, these issues raised in his appeals lodged against different detention and extension orders were repeatedly rejected by the Constitutional Court in its decisions of 8 October 2019, of 4 May 2020 and of 24 June 2020 with a reference to the limited scope of review of detention proceedings.

Outcome for Article 5: violation