The McCann couple, the parents of Maddie, the English girl that went missing in the Algarve in 2007, called for the nullity of the judgement of the Supreme Court of Justice, calling it frivolous (rash, imprudent) "because it was not possible for the Public Prosecutor to obtain sufficient evidence of crimes by the appellants".
The Supreme Court confirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals to revoke the payment of a compensation of 500 thousand euros by the former PJ inspector Gonçalo Amaral.
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Even though we don't know if this is a request to annul the Supreme Court ruling or if it is, as was published in the UK media, a formal complaint against the ruling or judges, a few thoughts:
An annulment can be requested of a ruling, even of a Supreme Court ruling. This must be done on a point of law. Since the ruling is extremely well structured, there are no technical points they can pick, the likely outcome is that this will be denied .
Fact of the matter is that the judges wrote several pages to come to the conclusion of the not cleared explanation and were explicit that it was not up to the Supreme Court to deliberate on their innocence or guilt.
There is a massive difference between being innocent and being cleared by an archival. The McCanns can always claim they are innocent but they cannot claim they have been declared innocent by the archival.
This issue was only addressed as a reply to the points in the appeal, points that were made by the McCanns themselves.
An annulment can only be considered on points of law, which would never include frivolity as an allegation.
In no way do we believe that frivolity may be invoked regarding the explanation of what a shelving of an investigation process means, about three Supreme Court judges when writing a structured and impartial decision which is available to read in its entirety and due context.
Finally, it is possible the judges will consider the frivolity allegation as defamatory and take legal action against the couple.
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