The applicant, Mrs Nicole Van Geyseghem, a Belgian national, was born in 1942 and lived at Hoeilaart (Belgium) at the material time.
In 1987 the applicant was prosecuted in the Belgian criminal courts for her involvement on three occasions in an international cocaine-trafficking ring in which her role was to import drugs from Brazil into Belgium.
After being convicted at first instance by the Brussels Criminal Court, she appealed. She did not attend the first hearing of her appeal, and subsequently applied, as she was entitled to do under Belgian law, to set aside the Court of Appeal’s judgment delivered in absentia, in which her conviction and sentence to three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 60,000 Belgian francs had been upheld. That application brought the case back before the Court of Appeal for a further hearing. The applicant did not attend that hearing either. Her counsel appeared and stated that he was representing his client and would be making submissions to the effect that the prosecution had become time-barred. The Court of Appeal refused him leave to represent his client and in a judgment of 4 October 1993 declared her application void. Mrs Van Geyseghem’s appeal to the Court of Cassation was dismissed on 4 May 1994.
Mrs Van Geyseghem complained that the Brussels Court of Appeal had refused to grant her counsel leave to defend her in her absence at the hearing of her appeal against a lower court’s refusal of her application to set aside a judgment. She alleged a breach of paragraphs 1 and 3 (c) of Article 6 of the Convention.
Citation: Van Geyseghem v Belgium (App no 26103/95) ECHR 21 January 1999
(from the official press-release prepared by the Registry Office of the European Court of Human Rights)