136 Legal Digest of International Fair Trial Rights • the accused be served with a summons to appear and to prepare her/his defence; • the consequences of the failure to appear are clearly explained in the summons; • an adjournment of the proceeding is granted if there are reasons to believe that the accused has been prevented from appearing; • trials are not conducted in absentia if it is possible and desirable to transfer the proceeding to another State, or to apply for extradition of the accused; • judgments passed in absentia are notified and the time-limit for appeal does not begin to run until the convicted person has had effective notice of the judgment, except when it is established that s/he has sought to evade justice; • a person tried in her/his absence on whom a summons has not been served in due and proper form must be provided with a remedy enabling her/him to have the judgment annulled; and • a person tried in her/his absence, but on whom a summons has been properly served, is entitled to a retrial, in the ordinary way, if that person can prove that absence from the trial and that failure to inform the judge of this were due to reasons beyond her/his control. 593 The right to take part in the trial is not absolute and can, therefore, be waived. As the European Court of Human Rights puts it, neither the letter nor the spirit of Article 6 prevents a person from waiving, of her/his own free will, either expressly or tacitly, the entitlement to the guarantees of a fair trial. However, such a waiver must be established in an “unequivocal manner and attended by minimum safeguards commensurate to its importance.”594 In Sejdovic v Italy, the Grand Chamber found a violation of Article 6, due to the lack of an effective mechanism to secure the rights of persons convicted in absentia where they had not been informed effectively of the proceedings against them and had not unequivocally waived their right to appear at their trial.595 In Lala v the Netherlands, the European Court adopted an even more far-reaching stance by stating that the fact that the defendant, in spite of having been properly summoned, does not appear, cannot – even in the absence of an excuse – justify depriving her/ him of her/his right to be defended by counsel (See also 6.6.3).596 In Maleki v Italy, Italy did not deny that Mr. Maleki had been tried in absentia. However, it failed to show that the applicant was summoned in a timely manner and that he was informed of the proceedings against him, stating that it assumed that the applicant was informed by his counsel of the proceedings. The Human Rights Committee considered this to be insufficient to discharge the burden placed on the State when seeking to justify trying an accused in absentia. It was incumbent on the court that tried the case, said the Committee, to verify that the applicant had been informed of the pending case before proceeding to 593 CoE Committee of Ministers Resolution (75) 11 on the Criteria Governing Proceedings Held in the Absence of the Accused, para I from 1 to 9. 594 Salduz v Turkey [2008] ECHR 1542, para 59; Ananyev v Russia [2009] ECHR 1241, para 38; Poitrimol v France [1993] ECHR 62, para 31; Yoldaş v Turkey [2010] ECHR 1620, para 51, in French only. 595 Sejdovic v Italy [2006] ECHR 181, para 109. 596 Lala v the Netherlands [1994] ECHR 30, para 33. Van Geyseghem v Belgium [1999] ECHR 5, para 34.