In a ruling handed down on 13 February 2024, the Court of Cassation recalled that opening envelopes and checking their contents is governed by the provisions of article 76 of the Code of Criminal Procedure relating to searches, which require, during a preliminary investigation, the consent of the person whose home the search is to be conducted in or, failing that, the authorisation of the liberty and custody judge.
The act may be declared null and void if its performance would have caused harm to the applicant.
In the case before the High Court, police officers had been informed of the suspected presence of narcotics in around twenty envelopes in a post office. When they went to check the envelopes, they opened one of them and discovered cannabis. They then proceeded to seize all the envelopes.
The investigating chamber of the Court of appeal, hearing a motion for the search of the envelopes to be declared null and void for breach of the provisions of the aforementioned Article 76, found that the defendant had deliberately given false sender names and fictitious shipping addresses so as not to be identified. It concluded that the defendant could not claim a right of his own to these addresses and ruled his application inadmissible.
The Court of Cassation, noting that objective elements of the proceedings made it possible to identify the defendant as the actual sender of the envelopes, declared that the appeal judges had wrongly declared the defendant’s application inadmissible.
However, the decision of the investigating chamber was not quashed, as the applicant failed to show that, apart from the seizure of the narcotics, the search, which had been carried out in breach of Article 76 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, had not caused him any prejudice.
Cass. crim., 13 February 2024, no. 23-82.950