Considerations Regarding the Exclusion of Derived Evidence in the Pre-Trial Chamber Procedure

Abstract

The immediate consequence of a void legal act is its lack of legal effect. Throughout the present thesis we intend to table the situation in which the substance of an evidence declared null by the court would be reflected within the content of the act authorizing the producing of another evidentiary procedure. In the situation where it can be ascertained the existence of a direct connection between the evidence produced in violation of one or many legal provisions and a subsequent proof, the natural and common sense remedy would be the annulment of the derived evidence. Having as starting point a practical case, we will be able to notice the reluctance of the Pre-trial Chamber judges in ordering the exclusion of the derived evidence, sometimes even in defiance of the recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.   The relevance of the existing essay consists in the analysis of the recent jurisprudence of the national courts in matter of nullity of evidence, being of interest both to magistrates and to lawyers and litigants.