The enforcement of this principle is a particularly delicate issue in the case of coercive measures, since, as I have already mentioned, these coercive acts are subject to fundamental rights restrictions without the issue of the criminal liability of the accused having been finally decided.2

Of course, in the context of determining whether the duration of proceedings is justified or unjustified, the complexity of the case in question and its factual characteristics must always be taken into account and it must be examined in relation to this whether the parties to the proceedings have not deliberately (in bad faith) contributed to delaying the proceedings, for example (1) by means of unnecessary motions to adduce evidence; (2) by means of continually submitted requests for postponement of the hearing; or (3) by means of unjustified omissions, etc. 3

In Csanádi v. Hungary (2004), the Court found a violation of Article 6(1) of the Convention (the right to a fair trial) on the basis that the Hungarian courts had infringed the fundamental right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time. The decision stated in principle that the reasonableness of the length of the proceedings must be assessed in the light of the specific circumstances of the case, i.e. the complexity of the facts of the case and the “procedural conduct” of the accused. In the Court’s view, the case in question was not particularly complex in such a way as to give rise to a prolongation of the proceedings. Although the accused exercised his rights under the Code of Criminal Procedure in force (submission of a motion, comments, notification of a bias objection), this cannot be held against him and he is not obliged to cooperate with the authorities. Moreover, in this case, the Hungarian court had a period of inactivity of 1 year, during which it did not hold any hearings, even though there would have been no reason not to do so.4

There is an interesting study by Ervin Belovics on the specifics of Hungarian procedures. The author points out that prior to the 1980s “the court trial was concentrated on one day in the majority of cases and only in cases with multiple defendants or multiple offences were two or possibly more days of trial held. From the early 1980s, however, this changed, with longer criminal trials, which also meant that more and more time elapsed between the suspected offender being brought to trial and the final determination of criminal responsibility. From the early 1990s, the situation became even worse, and sometimes the pre-trial or even trial stage of criminal proceedings alone took several years. The main reasons for this are seen by theorists and practitioners as being the quantitative increase in crime, the growing number of complex cases with difficult legal judgments and the increasing complexity of the rules of criminal procedure, which have led to increasing delays in the application of the timeliness requirement by the judicial authorities, sometimes resulting in criminal proceedings taking 8-10 years.”5

Problems with the application of the principle take different forms in continental and Anglo-Saxon systems. This is because, while the criminal proceedings in continental states seek to establish the material truth, i.e. the historical facts as fully as possible and as close to the truth as possible, in Anglo-Saxon proceedings the courts are content to judge the case on the basis of the evidence presented by the parties and to compare it. It is then obvious that, for reasons of guarantee alone, the evidentiary acts are much more detailed and lengthy in processes based on continental traditions. In Erzsébet Kadlót’s opinion, “the original sin was committed when the legislature allowed itself to be shackled and imposed the requirement of establishing the substantive truth in a trial as an obligation on the authorities. In so doing, it set the administration of justice an impossible task, and imposed an obstacle to the development of the law which has since successfully prevented the new requirements which have emerged in the meantime for the administration of justice, efficiency and timeliness, and the establishment of legal instruments which promote simplification. "6

According to Hungarian case law, the decisive factor for the unreasonableness of the duration of the proceedings is whether there is a period of time during which the authorities are inactive.7 It is also consistent to hold that the workload of the authorities is not in itself a sufficient explanation for the length of the proceedings, because the States are obliged to organise judicial activity in such a way as to enable them to fulfil all their obligations.8 The Court of Justice has, however, laid down as a rule that the “procedural conduct” of the applicant in the course of the proceedings, the delay in taking procedural steps, cannot be imputed to the public authorities when assessing whether the proceedings comply with the requirement of “a reasonable time”.9