The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on Thursday that the Spanish courts’ decision to discontinue investigating Spanish journalist David Couso Permuy’s death in Iraq due to a lack of jurisdiction did not breach the right of access to a court under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The ECHR held that the Spanish courts lacked jurisdiction to continue investigating the victim’s death as the Spanish legislative reforms only permitted foreigners to be prosecuted for alleged war crimes committed outside Spain if the foreigners were within Spanish territory. The ECHR said the Spanish courts enjoyed discretion in limiting their scope of litigation to cases with sufficient links to Spain to ensure that their courts would not be overburdened.

In addition, the ECHR stated that the applicant, David Couso Permuy’s brother, was permitted to bring his complaints before the Spanish courts from 2003 to 2015 before Spain lost jurisdiction to hear the case upon the imposition of the legislative reforms. The ECHR also said that Spanish judicial authorities conducted a detailed criminal investigation into Permuy’s death and checked whether the alleged perpetrators could be prosecuted in the US or Iraq when Spanish courts had jurisdiction.

The ECHR found that it would be impossible to prosecute the three US servicemen named in the applicant’s criminal complaint as US authorities would not surrender the servicemen and Spanish law does not permit trials in absentia. Nonetheless, the court did not exclude the possibility of reopening the case if the three US servicemen traveled to Spain.

The Spanish Supreme Court previously ordered a lower court on July 6, 2010 to reopen the investigation into the death of the victim who was mortally wounded by US tank fire in Iraq in 2003. The Spanish National Court dismissed charges on July 14, 2009 against the three US soldiers who were accused of being involved in the victim’s death. The court recommended that the case be closed because no new evidence had been produced since Judge Santiago Pedraz Gomez reinstated the charges in May 2009. Homicide charges filed against Sgt. Shawn Gibson, Capt. Philip Wolford and Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp were initially dropped in 2007 due to a lack of evidence. US authorities have claimed that the attack was in response to hostile fire and was consistent with the rules of combat.