O’HALLORAN AND FRANCIS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT – DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE PAVLOVSCHI 29 procedure; and (d) the use to which any material so obtained is put (see Jalloh v. Germany [GC], no. 54810/00, §§ 117-21, ECHR 2006-IX). The general requirements of fairness contained in Article 6, including the right not to incriminate oneself, apply to criminal proceedings in respect of all types of criminal offences without distinction, from the most simple to the most complex. The public interest cannot be invoked to justify the use of answers compulsorily obtained in a non-judicial investigation to incriminate the accused during the trial proceedings (see Saunders, cited above, § 74). The security and public-order concerns relied on by the Government cannot justify a provision which extinguishes the very essence of the applicants’ rights to silence and against self-incrimination guaranteed by Article 6 § 1 of the Convention (see Heaney and McGuinness, cited above, § 58). In my view, the provisions of section 172 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 amount to a deviation from the principle of prohibition of “compulsory self-incrimination” and a breach of the right to silence, and can be considered as subjecting the individuals concerned to a legal compulsion to give evidence against themselves. Moreover, the applicants in this case were actually subjected to legal compulsion to give evidence which incriminated them. It is of crucial importance to provide an answer to the question whether or not the information which the applicants were requested to submit to the investigating authorities was really “self-incriminating”. In comparable circumstances in Rieg v. Austria (no. 63207/00, 24 March 2005), the First Section stated as follows: “... It was merely in his capacity as the registered car owner that he was required to give information. Moreover, he was only required to state a simple fact – namely who had been the driver of his car – which is not in itself incriminating. ...” Personally, I cannot agree with the above statement, because no attempt was made to determine the meaning of the word “incriminating” and how it differs from “self-incriminating”. Nevertheless, without answering this question it is not possible in abstracto to determine whether a statement is or is not incriminating. Unfortunately, our case-law does not provide us with a clear definition of this notion. On the other hand, we can find some indications which might help us to establish such a definition. In Saunders, the Court stated as follows: “... there were clearly instances where the statements were used by the prosecution to incriminating effect in order to establish the applicant’s knowledge of payments to persons involved in the share-support operation and to call into question his honesty ... They were also used by counsel for the applicant’s co-accused to cast doubt on the applicant’s version of events ...