CYIL Vol. 7, 2016

VÍT ALEXANDER SCHORM CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ In Rohlena v. the Czech Republic , the Grand Chamber had already confirmed the Chamber’s conclusion with regard to the principle of legality of criminal offences and punishments and the application was definitively rejected. In the “out-of-hospital deliveries case” of Dubská and Krejzová v. the Czech Republic , commented on last year, the Grand Chamber held a hearing in December 2015 and since then the case has been awaiting final judgment. The least mature of the three is the case of Regner v. the Czech Republic , assessed from the standpoint of the right to adversarial proceedings and equality of arms, whose referral was accepted only in May 2016. The article below will focus on the first and the last of the three cases pointed out. 1. No punishment without law The above title appears above the text of Article 7 of the Convention, applied in the case of Rohlena v. the Czech Republic (no. 59552/08, judgment [GC] of 27 January 2015). Paragraph 1 of Article 7, relevant in the context, comprises two sentences, out of which the Court took into account both. The first of them reflects the principle of nullum crimen sine lege previa, while the second refers to the principle of nulla poena sine lege previa . The Court was confronted with a case in which the applicant had been accused of committing a series of acts of domestic violence against his wife, but the applicable criminal legislation had been amended in between these assaults, with the aim to better tackle this reprehensible phenomenon. 1 Various national authorities, dealing step by step with the case, adopted slightly different approaches to the classification of the facts. 2 For the prosecution, Mr Rohlena was guilty of the criminal offence of abusing a person living under the same roof; his actions prior to the introduction of that offence into the Criminal Code on 1 June 2004 amounted to the offence of violence against an individual or group of individuals and assault occasioning bodily harm, punishable under specific Articles of the Criminal Code of that time. The first instance criminal court found the applicant guilty of a newly formulated offence, applying this classification also to the acts committed prior to 1 June 2004, since at that time they had amounted at least to one of the previously defined offences. Finally, the Supreme Court established a continuation of the criminal offence in the case; hence, the applicant’s acts needed to be assessed under the criminal law in force at the time of the last occurrence of the offence, provided that the acts also amounted 1 It would be possible to refer to various international recommendations aiming at providing effective protection to the victims of domestic violence, in particular that directed against women. The Court has already dealt with affairs of this nature and found deficiencies in the protection afforded. So the case at hand reflected also the need to improve domestic legislation in this ambit. 2 Being acquainted with the case file, I can mention the paradoxical fact that the Strasbourg Court devoted much more time, energy and resources to processing this case than the national authorities had done altogether.

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