7 shots close range in the back. ( Archived) (268)

he must have made the wrong move like your american guy.

Relatives of Jean Charles de Menezes have lost a legal challenge against the decision not to charge police officers who killed him because they mistakenly believed he was a suicide bomber.

The decision by the European court of human rights in Strasbourg brings to an end a controversy that has endured since 2005 following the Brazilian electrician’s death at Stockwell tube station, south London. His family condemned the judgment for allowing police to avoid accountability.
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A string of blunders led members of the Metropolitan police’s elite armed unit, CO19, to open fire with their guns just 1cm to 8cm away from De Menezes’ head as he was pinned down into a seat on an underground train. He died instantly.

The incident on 22 July 2005 followed a series of terrorist attacks in London – the suicide bombings that killed 56 people on 7 July and the failed attacks on 21 July. De Menezes lived at the same block of flats in Tulse Hill, south London, as two of the suspects in the previous day’s bombings and had been followed by surveillance officers to Stockwell station when he left for work that morning.

The Crown Prosecution Service decided the following year that no individual should face charges. The challenge to the CPS’s refusal to prosecute the officers was brought by Patricia Armani da Silva, who is De Menezes’ cousin.

The case was heard in the grand chamber of the ECHR, which deals with cases potentially affecting interpretation of the European convention on human rights.

By a majority of 13 to four, the judges ruled that the UK had not violated article two of the convention, which guarantees the right to life. The dissenting judges were from Turkey, Russia, Poland and Spain.

“The decision not to prosecute any individual officer was not due to any failings in the investigation or the state’s tolerance of or collusion in unlawful acts,” the court declared. “Rather, it was due to the fact that, following a thorough investigation, a prosecutor had considered all the facts of the case and concluded that there was insufficient evidence against any individual officer to prosecute.”

The ECHR acknowledged that all the UK independent authorities considering the actions of the two firearms officers “had carefully examined the reasonableness of their belief that Jean Charles de Menezes had been a suicide bomber who could detonate a bomb at any second”.
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The Strasbourg court also accepted that the evidential test applied by the CPS in deciding whether to prosecute had been within the state’s discretion – what is known legally as its “margin of appreciation”.

The test applied in England and Wales had not been “arbitrary”, having been the subject of frequent reviews, public consultations and political scrutiny, the court added. Nor is there a uniform, alternative approach by other European states to the evidential test employed.

The ECHR dismissed claims that article two required the evidential test to be lowered in cases where deaths had occurred at the hands of state agents.

“The facts of the present case are undoubtedly tragic and the frustration of Mr De Menezes’ family at the absence of any individual prosecutions is understandable,” the judgment said. “However, it cannot be said that any question of the authorities’ responsibility for the death … was left in abeyance.”

It added: “As the government have pointed out, sometimes lives are lost as a result of failures in the overall system rather than individual error entailing criminal or disciplinary liability … It cannot be said that the domestic authorities have failed to discharge the procedural obligation under article two of the convention to conduct an effective investigation into the shooting of Mr De Menezes.”

Yes he should have. When ordered to do something by the police you do it. If you think you've been treated unfairly then you argue the toss later, by making an official complaint or getting yourself a solicitor or whatever but you do it after the event, not during it.

The voice of eason at last.