sils quote
Unless the full judgement states or implies that Madeleine is dead, or presumed dead,
page 11
..."the law protects, however, not only that personal feeling of own worth, which can call up the internal honour, but above the projection in the social consciousness of all the personal values of each individual, which can be called external honour : the qualities a person needs to be respected in a social environment, including the good name and the reputation, the social consideration" [ op. cit. p. 587] .
The protection of the rights of the claimants to their good name and reputation is, in this case, closely related to the presumption of innocence.
The claimants Gerald and Kate McCann were made arguidos (formal suspects) in the criminal investigation, a status that had the function to guarantee their rights (though not being interpreted this way by the general public) and ceased with the closure of the investigation having the dispatch (AG) report concluded :"It has not been possible to obtain any piece of evidence that would allow for a average man, under the light of the criteria of logics, of normality and of the general rules of experience, to formulate any lucid, sensate, serious and honest conclusion about the circumstances under which the child was removed from the apartment (whether dead or alive, whether killed in a neglectful homicide or an intended homicide, whether the victim of a targeted abduction or an opportunistic abduction), nor even to produce a consistent prognosis about her destiny and inclusively - the most dramatic - to establish whether she is still alive or if she is dead, as seems more likely. (…) Therefore, after everything seen, analysed and duly pondered, facing all that is left exposed, we settle (…) the archiving of the process concerning the arguidos Gerald Patrick McCann and Kate Marie Healy, because there are no indications of their practise of any crime" (n° 15).
