yone arrested or detained in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 1 (c) of this Article shall be... entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial. Release may be conditioned by guarantees to appear for trial."
A. Submissions by the parties
71. The Government submitted that the period of the applicant's detention had been reasonable, that it had been in accordance with the national legislation and had been based on relevant and sufficient grounds: the applicant was accused of having committed several grave crimes; he had no permanent residence and had previously breached another preventive measure. Besides, the applicant had committed a number of especially serious crimes in the period of application to him, within another criminal case, of restraint in the form of a written undertaking not to leave, and a number of crimes while he was in the pre-trial detention facility. In these circumstances the application of a more lenient preventive measure would have represented a real threat to others, as well as to the prompt administration of justice.
72. The applicant submitted that his pre-trial detention had lasted four years, four months and five days from 25 December 1999 to 30 April 2004. He agreed that until 25 December 2001 his detention had been justified by the reasonable suspicion that he had committed several murders. However, with the lapse of time this ground became less relevant, and the domestic court should have put forward more weighty grounds justifying his continued detention. The applicant drew the Court's attention to the fact that on 8 January 2002 St Petersburg City Court ordered that the preventive measure applied to the applicant should remain unchanged, without citing any particular reason for that decision. The subsequent extension orders referred solely to the gravity of the charges against the applicant and the risk of him absconding and also concerned five other co-defendants without regard to their individual situation. The applicant therefore concluded that his continued detention had not been based on relevant and sufficient grounds, and that the domestic court had failed to show particular diligence in deciding this matter.
B. The Court's assessment
1. Admissibility
73. The Court notes that this complaint is not manifestly ill-founded within the meaning of Article 35 § 3 of the Convention and is not inadmissible on any other grounds. It must therefore be declared admissible.
2. Merits
(a) General principles
74. The Court reiterates that the persistence of reasonable suspicion that the person arrested has committed an offence is a condition sine qua non for the lawfulness of the continued detention. However after a certain lapse of time it no longer suffices. In such cases the Court must establish whether the other grounds given by the judicial authorities continued to justify the deprivation of liberty. Where such grounds were "relevant" and "sufficient", the Court must also ascertain whether the competent national authorities displayed "special diligence" in the conduct of the proceedings (see Labita v. Italy [GC], No. 26772/95, §§ 152 and 153, ECHR 2000-IV).
75. The presumption is in favour of release. As the Court has consistently held, the second limb of Article 5 § 3 does not give judicial authorities a choice between either bringing an accused to trial within a reasonable time and granting him provisional release pending trial. Until his conviction the accused must be presumed innocent, and the purpose of the provision under consideration is essentially to require his provisional release once his continuing detention ceases to be reasonable (see, among other authorities, Castravet v. Moldova, No. 23393/05, § 30, 13 March 2007; McKay v. the United Kingdom [GC], No. 543/03, §
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