MEDVEDYEV AND OTHERS v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 35 authorities had complied with the requirement of promptness, while pointing out that it had been materially impossible to bring the applicant before the investigating judge any sooner and that the applicant had been presented to the investigating judge the day after his arrival on Spanish soil. 113. The Government also considered that in its McKay judgment the Court had accepted derogations from the principle of the automatic nature of the review. 114. Concerning the characteristics and powers of the officer concerned, the Government maintained that although the Court had found that a public prosecutor or other judicial officer appearing for the prosecution could not be considered a “judge” for the purposes of Article 5 § 3 (see Huber, cited above), the same could not be said of an investigating judge. Investigating judges were fully independent judges whose job was to seek evidence both for and against the accused party, without participating in the prosecution or the judgment of the cases they investigated. In France the investigating judge supervised all custodial measures taken in the cases under his responsibility – be it police custody or detention pending trial – and could terminate them at any time. Although he had to apply to the liberties and detention judge when contemplating remanding a suspect in custody, he had full power to release people or place them under court supervision. The Government pointed out that the Court had already ruled that the investigating judge fulfilled the conditions laid down in Article 5 § 3 (see A.C. v. France (dec.), no. 37547/97, 14 December 1999). 115. The Government affirmed that the applicants had been brought before the investigating judges, without having had to ask, the same day they arrived in Brest, as soon as had been possible. 116. Lastly, the Government considered that the public prosecutor was a legal authority independent of the executive, and that his supervision while the Winner was rerouted to Brest had provided the protection against arbitrariness which Article 5 of the Convention was meant to guarantee. C. The Court’s assessment 1. General principles 117. The Court reiterates that Article 5 of the Convention is in the first rank of the fundamental rights that protect the physical security of an individual, and that three strands in particular may be identified as running through the Court’s case-law: the exhaustive nature of the exceptions, which must be interpreted strictly and which do not allow for the broad range of justifications under other provisions (Articles 8 to 11 of the Convention in particular); the repeated emphasis on the lawfulness of the detention, procedurally and substantively, requiring scrupulous adherence to the rule