The Right of the Accused to be Present at Trial

The accused’s right to be present at their trial is an intrinsic section of their right to a due process. It is, in fact, reported both implicitly and explicitly in a variety of sources of international law, among which the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights or the very recent Directive 2016/343 of the European Union. The relevance of the right in question particularly arises in the context in criminal proceedings, where the defendant is usually the weaker party as opposed to the public prosecutor, and they are therefore in need of guarantees of protection. As the reader will be able to acknowledge in the following chapters, the accused’s right to be present is strictly intertwined with a variety of other guarantees that constitute their overall right to a fair trial. Indeed, as far as the law of the Council of Europe is concerned, such a right is not explicitly mentioned in the wording of Article 6 of the Convention. Nevertheless, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights widely accepts it and considers an implicit right in the wording of Article 6. The gaps left by the nonspecific character of the wording of Article 6 highlighted the need for more detailed guarantees, which were brought by the European Union with the adoption of the very recent Directive (EU) 2016/343 on the strengthening of certain aspects of the presumption of innocence and the right to be present at trial in criminal proceedings. In addition, nowadays the whole world is facing a sanitary emergency because of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is challenging the normality of everyday tasks, included the normal exercise of judicial activity in court. Such a situation could result in the jeopardizing of the accused’s right to be present at their hearing.