Judicial Reasoning as a Guarantee of Fair Criminal Trial in the Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The obligation to state reasons for judicial decisions lies at the heart of contemporary debate on the rule of law and the legitimacy of adjudication. This article reconstructs and assesses the standard of judicial reasoning in criminal proceedings as it emerges from the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. Although the European Convention on Human Rights does not expressly guarantee a right to a reasoned decision, the ECtHR has derived it from the fair-trial guarantee under Article 6 § 1 through a dynamic interpretation grounded in the idea of the rule of law. The article seeks to determine the standard of judicial reasoning in criminal proceedings that can be derived from this guarantee. The question is of practical significance given the diversity of domestic approaches to the form and content of judicial reasons. Methodologically, the study is doctrinal and combines a qualitative analysis of the Court’s leading case law with a theoretical reconstruction of the functions performed by judicial reasoning. The analysis proceeds in three stages. It first examines the multifunctional character of the duty to give reasons, identifying its communicative and legitimising, guarantee, self-regulatory, and supervisory functions. It then traces the development of the right to a reasoned judgment in the Strasbourg jurisprudence. Finally, it considers the requirements of completeness and coherence, together with the limits of the obligation and its application to jury verdicts, appellate and cassation rulings, and interlocutory decisions affecting liberty and privacy. The authors argue that the duty to give reasons performs several functions, and that its scope and form vary according to the procedural context in which those functions are to be fulfilled. A reasoned judgment thus operates both as a safeguard against arbitrariness and as an expression of a democratic culture of justification.