16 SAUNDERS v. UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT Funke v. France (25 February 1993, Series A no. 256-A, p. 22, para. 44) and John Murray v. the United Kingdom (8 February 1996, Reports of Judgments and Decisions 1996-I, p. 49, para. 45), was the right of an individual not to be compelled to contribute incriminating evidence to be used in a prosecution against him. This principle was closely linked to the presumption of innocence which was expressly guaranteed by Article 6 para. 2 of the Convention (art. 6-2) and had been recognised by the Court of Justice of the European Communities (Orkem v. Commission, Case 374/87 [1989] European Court Reports 3283) and by the Constitutional Court of South Africa (Ferreira v. Levin and Others, judgment of 6 December 1995) amongst others. It should apply equally to all defendants regardless of the nature of the allegations against them or their level of education and intelligence. It followed that the use made by the prosecution of the transcripts of interviews with the inspectors in subsequent criminal proceedings was contrary to Article 6 (art. 6). 61. Furthermore, the applicant argued that this use of the transcripts was particularly unfair in his case since, in the words of the Court of Appeal, they "formed a significant part of the prosecution case". Three days were spent reading extracts from his interviews with the inspectors to the jury before Mr Saunders decided that he ought to give evidence to explain and expand upon this material. As a result, he was subjected to intensive cross-examination concerning alleged inconsistencies between his oral testimony at trial and his responses to the inspectors’ questions, to which the trial judge drew attention in his summing-up to the jury. The prosecution’s task was thus facilitated when it was able to contrast its own evidence with Mr Saunders’s more specific denials in his interviews. b) The Government 62. The Government submitted that only statements which are self-incriminating can fall within the privilege against self-incrimination. However, exculpatory answers or answers which, if true, are consistent with or would serve to confirm the defence of an accused cannot be properly characterised as self-incriminating. In their submission, neither the applicant nor the Commission had identified at any stage a single answer given by the applicant to the DTI inspectors which was self-incriminating. There cannot be derived from the privilege against self-incrimination a further right not to be confronted with evidence that requires the accused, in order successfully to rebut it, to give evidence himself. That, in effect, was what the applicant was claiming when he alleged that the admission of the transcript "compelled" him to give evidence. The Government accepted that a defendant in a criminal trial cannot be compelled by the prosecution or by the court to appear as a witness at his own trial or to answer questions put to him in the dock, and that an infringement of this principle would be likely to result in a defendant not