Chapter iii  Right to a Hearing by a Competent, Independent and Impartial Tribunal Established by Law 63 (See also 3.3.2(b)). This should dissuade judicial officers from making use of the press, even if in reaction to media requests.229 In Buscemi v Italy, public statements to the press by the President of the court implied that he had already formed an unfavorable view of the applicant’s case, before the case was heard, and led the European Court to consider such statements to be incompatible with the impartiality required of judicial officers.230 Cases of this kind will also have an impact on the presumption of innocence (See also 5.1). Personal prejudice might also take the form of unbalanced or clearly biased directions to a jury given during the course of a trial judge’s summing up.231 In Farhi v France, the European Court found a violation of subjective impartiality in a case involving informal communication between the prosecutor and one of the jurors which the judge had refused to record as an incident. The European Court questioned the limited verification carried out by the judge and considered that the judge’s behaviour deprived the applicant of the possibility of effective appeal to the Court of Cassation.232 The facts in Lavents v Latvia233 should be distinguished from those in Perera v Sri Lanka, which concerned civil proceedings between the applicant and his former employer. The applicant claimed that the encouragement by the Chief Justice that both parties reach an amicable settlement on the quantum of damages exceeded the bounds of a superior court’s proper management of its judicial resources. The Human Rights Committee noted that counsel did not explicitly contest the Court’s framing of the disposition of the case and that, in substance, the High Court’s findings in the applicant’s favour were almost entirely upheld at the appellate level. It was concluded, therefore, that the applicant’s claim had been unsubstantiated and inadmissible under Article 2 of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR.234 3.3.2(b) Objective impartiality Concerning the second feature of objective impartiality, it is essential that judicial officers exercise their function in a manner that offers sufficient guarantees to exclude any legitimate doubt of their impartiality, i.e., the tribunal must appear, to the reasonable observer, to be impartial. As repeated in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights: “it must be determined whether, quite apart from the judge’s conduct, there are ascertainable facts which may raise doubts as to his impartiality. In this respect even appearances may be of a certain importance”.235 In practical terms, this calls for the exercise of two separate duties: first, a general duty on the State to protect the judiciary from conflicts of inter- 229 Kyprianou v Cyprus [2005] ECHR 873, para 120; Buscemi v Italy [1999] ECHR 70, para 67. 230 Buscemi v Italy [1999] ECHR 70, para 68. 231 See, for example, Wright v Jamaica, HRC Communication 349/1988, UN Doc CCPR/C/45/D/349/1989 (1992), para 3.3. 232 Farhi v France [2007] ECHR 5562, paras 28–31. 233 Lavents v Latvia [2002] ECHR 786, available in French only. 234 Perera v Sri Lanka, HRC Communication 1091/2002, UN Doc CCPR/C/78/D/1091/2002 (2003), para 6.3. 235 Ferrantelli and Santangelo v Italy [1996] ECHR 29, para 58; Hauschildt v Denmark [1989] ECHR 7, para 48; Wettstein v Switzerland [2000] ECHR 695, para 44; Daktaras v Lithuania [2000] ECHR 460, para 32; Kyprianou v Cyprus [2005] ECHR 873, para 118.