CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE DE MEYER

To this judgment, the result of which I fully approve, I would add a brief remark.

Once again reference is made in its reasoning to "appearances" (paragraphs 73 and 76).

First of all, I would observe that the Court did not need to rely on "appearances", since there were enough convincing elements to enable it to conclude that the court-martial system, under which Lance-Sergeant Findlay was convicted and sentenced in the present case, was not acceptable.

Moreover, I would like to stress that, as a matter of principle, we should never decide anything on the basis of "appearances", and that we should, in particular, not allow ourselves to be impressed by them in determining whether or not a court is independent and impartial. We have been wrong to do so in the past, and we should not do so in the future.

[1] The case is numbered 110/1995/616/706. The first number is the case's position on the list of cases referred to the Court in the relevant year (second number). The last two numbers indicate the case's position on the list of cases referred to the Court since its creation and on the list of the corresponding originating applications to the Commission.

[2] Rules A apply to all cases referred to the Court before the entry into force of Protocol No. 9 (P9) (1 October 1994) and thereafter only to cases concerning States not bound by that Protocol (P9). They correspond to the Rules that came into force on 1 January 1983, as amended several times subsequently.

[3] For practical reasons this annex will appear only with the printed version of the judgment (in Reports of Judgments and Decisions 1997-I), but a copy of the Commission's report is obtainable from the registry.