The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday announced its verdict on the case brought by the parents of the missing British child Madeleine McCann. It stressed that Portugal had given them a fair trial in the libel suit against a former Portuguese police officer.
Police officer Goncalo Amaral worked on Madeleine's disappearance in 2007. He subsequently wrote a book ('Truth of the Lie') that suggested the toddler's parents were connected with her disappearance.
The parents, Gerry McCann and Kate Healy, took legal action against Amaral. This led to a Portuguese court ruling in their favour in 2015, telling Amaral to pay damages. However, the verdict was reversed two years later by Portugal's highest court.
They then appealed to a European court, saying that their right to a fair trial and privacy hadn't been upheld in Portugal.
Legal proceedings
The McCann parents alleged that "their reputation had been violated, along with their right to be presumed innocent." Yet the ECHR ruled that Portugal's courts had not failed to protect the rights of Gerry McCann and Kate Healy.
"Even assuming that the applicants’ reputation had been damaged, this was not on account of the argument put forward by the book’s author but rather as a result of the suspicions expressed against them," the ECHR said. This subsequently led to them being placed under investigation in the course of the criminal investigation.
Disappearance
Madeleine McCann was three years old when she disappeared on holiday with her parents in 2007 in Portugal. Initial investigations by the Portuguese police didn't find any decisive leads and detectives briefly turned their attention on the McCann parents.
A year later investigations against them were dropped. They have since campaigned to draw attention to their daughter's disappearance.
In 2020, a German prosecutor found new evidence that incriminated a key suspect, who was a convicted child abuser and involved in the drug trade. The suspect is currently in prison for raping a woman in the same locality where Madeleine disappeared.
