Trial Publicity during the State of Emergency

Abstract

Due to the coronavirus an extraordinary court pause was ordered in March 2020. The courts were re-opened two weeks later and one of the main purpose of court leaders was to reduce the possibility of infection having as less people in the court buildings as possible. This aim was intended to obtain through the exclusion of the public from the court trials. In the present paper we examined how the introduced regulations of court buildings corresponded with the human right and constitutional requirements of the right to a fair trial and how they fit into the system of the norms of the extraordinary legal order introduced in the state of emergency due to the coronavirus. Our conclusion is that the measures issued by the government during the extraordinary legal order did not allow any diversion from the procedural principle of public trial, but the administrative measures taken by the court leaders practically abolished the publicity of the trials. The recent modification of the court buildings regulation due to the second wave of the coronavirus, doesn’t stop the public to access court trials, but the present rules raise the removal of an important content of publicity, the anonymity of the public, who embodies the social control over the court proceedings.