The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the Mediaset TV rights tax fraud trial was fair. Sixteen years after the final conviction handed down by the Supreme Court, the Strasbourg Court unanimously rejected Silvio Berlusconi's appeal against Italy, finding the claims alleging violations of his fundamental rights to be unfounded. Berlusconi's sentence was set at four years in prison, three of which were covered by the 2006 pardon.

After Berlusconi's death in June 2023, his heirs decided to continue the case before the ECHR, challenging several aspects of the Italian judicial proceedings. These include the impartiality of the Supreme Court of Cassation panel that upheld the conviction in 2013, the procedures for assigning the case to the summer division, and the decisions regarding the handling of hearings and the evidence presented by the defense.

In its ruling, the European Court examined the various challenges, concluding that insufficient evidence had emerged to demonstrate a violation of the right to a fair trial, protected by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Specifically, the Strasbourg judges found no evidence of bias on the part of the magistrates involved in the proceedings, nor any evidence suggesting that the assignment of the case had been influenced by the intention to assign it to specific judges. The appeal was therefore deemed "manifestly ill-founded."

(Unioneonline)