MORICE v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 13 Indictments Division of the Paris Court of Appeal had received, on 5 September, the file in the “Scientology” case, in which Judge M. was suspected of being responsible for the disappearance of evidence; and that this showed, on the part of the applicant, personal animosity and an intention to discredit those judges, in particular Judge M., with whom he had been in conflict in various cases, thus ruling out any good faith on his part. 51. The applicant, his two co-defendants and Judge M. all lodged an appeal on points of law against that judgment. In his pleadings, the applicant relied, as his first ground of appeal, on Article 10 of the Convention and the immunity provided for in section 41 of the Freedom of the Press Act, arguing that this provision sought to safeguard defence rights and protected lawyers in respect of any oral or written comments made in the context of any type of judicial proceedings, in particular of a disciplinary nature. As his second ground of appeal, he relied on Article 10 of the Convention, asserting that: the impugned comments concerned a case that had been receiving media coverage for some time, involving the suspicious circumstances in which a French judge seconded to Djibouti had been found dead “from suicide” and the questionable manner in which the judicial investigation had been conducted, with a clear bias against the civil party’s theory of premeditated murder; having regard to the importance of the subject of general interest in the context of which the comments had been made, the Court of Appeal was not entitled to find that he had overstepped the bounds of his freedom of expression; the Court of Appeal had not examined his good faith in the light of the comments that had been published in Le Monde, but in relation to the content of the letter to the Minister of Justice and it was not entitled to make any assessment concerning the judges’ conduct criticised therein; unless all lawyers were to be banned from speaking about pending cases, no personal animosity could be inferred from the mere fact that he had had a disagreement with one of the judges in the context of another set of proceedings; good faith was not subject to the current situation or to the fact that the issue had been “made good” by the withdrawal of the case from the judges, the lack of necessity of the comments not being incompatible with good faith; lastly, opinions expressed regarding the functioning of a fundamental institution of the State, as was the case regarding the handling of a criminal investigation, were not subject to a duty of prudence or limited to theoretical and abstract criticism, but could be personal where they had a sufficient factual basis. 52. The appeals were initially supposed to be heard by a reduced bench of Section I of the Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation, as shown by the reporting judge’s report of 21 July 2009, the Court of Cassation’s online workflow for the case, and the three notices to parties issued on 15 September, and 14 and 27 October 2009, respectively, the last two of those documents having been sent after the date of the hearing.