Summary:

I.
The applicant has been confined in remand detention since May 2016. After the public prosecution office had charged him with murder and other crimes, the competent criminal court commenced the trial in November 2016, scheduled trial hearings until September 2017, and ordered continued remand detention. After twenty-three hearings, the presiding judge fell ill in August 2017, and was incapable of returning to work. The competent court division suspended the proceedings. After a new presiding judge had been assigned to the division, the trial recommenced in December 2017. Twenty-five trial hearings were held until August 2018 and another four trial hearings were held until November 2018. Until January 2019, further fifteen trial hearings were scheduled. The competent court division repeatedly reported a work overload to the President of the court. In August 2018, the court-appointed defence counsel of the accused lodged a complaint against the remand detention and claimed a violation of the requirement to expedite proceedings. In October 2018, the Higher Regional Court dismissed the complaint as unfounded and upheld the continued remand detention. With his constitutional complaint, the applicant challenged this decision.

II.
The Federal Constitutional Court decided that the decision of the Higher Regional Court violates the applicant’s fundamental right to liberty pursuant to the second sentence of Article 2.2 in conjunction with Article 104 of the Basic Law. The Court remanded the matter to the Higher Regional Court for a new decision.

The decision is based on the following considerations:
Restrictions of a person’s liberty are subject to strict procedural guarantees and must be based on particularly significant reasons. Due to the presumption of innocence, depriving a suspect of liberty is only exceptionally permissible. Regardless of the expected sentence, the principle of proportionality limits the length of remand detention. The longer remand detention lasts the more weight is attributed to the right to liberty compared to the interest in effective law enforcement. Therefore, the requirements for expediting the proceedings become more demanding in light of the length of remand detention, and the reasons put forward to justify remand detention must be more compelling. When the right to liberty of the person concerned is balanced with the interest of the public in effective law enforcement, it must be assessed on the basis of objective criteria of the individual case whether continued detention is appropriate. It can only be justified in special and exceptional cases to execute remand detention for more than a year before the trial commences or a sentence is pronounced. If it is foreseeable that proceedings are complex, it is necessary to carefully plan the trial for a longer period and to schedule more than an average of one trial hearing per week. Remand detention cannot be considered to be necessary if its continued execution is a result of delays in the proceedings that are not rooted in the specific criminal proceedings. In the event of substantial and avoidable delays of the proceedings that are attributable to the state, the seriousness of the offence and the expected sentence alone cannot justify lengthy remand detention.
Work overload of a court that is not only short-term can never justify continued remand detention. Notably, such a situation cannot justify continued remand detention even if results from a case load that cannot be coped with in reasonable time although all organisational measures available to the court have been taken. The state is held responsible if courts suffer from work overload. Therefore, persons charged with a criminal offence cannot be held in remand detention for long periods based on the fact that the state did not fulfil its duty to provide courts with sufficient resources in a way that meets constitutional requirements.
Furthermore, protection of fundamental rights must also be guaranteed throughout proceedings; thus, decisions on continued detention must be substantiated with particular care.
The challenged order of the Higher Regional Court did not satisfy these standards. It does not indicate any specific circumstances that suggest that continued remand detention was constitutionally acceptable in that particular case. The criminal court’s schedule for the trial hearings does not satisfy the constitutional requirements concerning the frequency of such hearings. In this case, the frequency did not even reach an average of one trial day per week, and ultimately even only reached an average of 0.65 trial days per week which is far from being sufficiently frequent. The measures taken by the court after the work overload had been reported are ineffective. Thus, the requirement to expedite proceedings is neither satisfied nor was the delay compensated effectively. In addition, the order of the Higher Regional Court does not set out plausible reasons that could justify the continued remand detention as an exception in this case. The aspects put forward by the Higher Regional Court – in particular, the complexity of the proceedings, the extremely serious charges, and the delays of the proceedings caused by the defence counsel – as well as the illness of the previous presiding judge may justify the remand detention as such and the number of necessary trial hearings, but they cannot justify that the court failed to schedule hearings more frequently.