Experts rate the comprehensibility of the notification of suspects’ rights as average. Police officers and lawyers interviewed by the Human Rights Monitoring Institute said that suspects are explained their right to a lawyer, the right to remain silent and other procedural rights, but in complicated legal language that is difficult to understand without legal education.
Every suspect is informed of his rights
Each suspect is given a Letter of Rights before questioning – a 3-page document that describes the procedural guarantees in long, complex sentences, sometimes as long as five lines. The language of the Letter of Rights is rather technical, referring in several places to the “procedures” laid down in the Code of Criminal Procedure or other laws.
On average, a suspect receives 15 minutes to familiarise himself with his rights. Suspects often do not read the report itself carefully and pay less attention to it than they should. Almost half of the police officers interviewed said they rarely or never receive questions about rights from suspects.
Police officers rarely take their own initiative to ensure that suspects understand the content of their rights. The vast majority of officers interviewed rarely or never took additional steps to ensure that the suspect understood the content of his or her rights.
Information must be provided in plain and intelligible language
“The right to information is an important part of our daily life when dealing with public authorities. And the right to information of people suspected of a crime is essential, as it enables them to exercise all their other rights and ensures the implementation of the right to a fair trial,” said Karolis Liutkevičius, a lawyer at the HRMI who conducted the study. “This is why information on rights must be provided in plain, easy-to-understand language”.
HRMI works to ensure that the information provided by public authorities is understandable to the public and that people can actually use it. With the help of communication expert Rytis Juozapavičius and criminal procedure expert Prof. Aurelijus Gutauskas, a judge of the Supreme Court of Lithuania, the Institute has prepared an alternative, more easily understandable version of the notification of the rights of the suspect.
16 June an alternative document has been submitted to the Prosecutor General’s Office. HRMI intends to continue to work with the General Prosecutor’s Office to ensure that the Letter of Rights becomes a comprehensible and realistic document informing people of their rights.
Since 2014. Every suspect in Lithuania is given a Letter of Rights – a written document outlining his or her rights during the investigation and trial. These rights include the right to know the allegations against you, to have a lawyer, to have a translator, to be informed of your detention, to have access to urgently needed medical care, to remain silent, etc. This report was adopted in implementation of the EU Directive on the right to information in criminal proceedings. Most of the provisions of the Directive have been correctly transposed into national law.
