The applicant, Josette Prencipe, is a French national who was born in 1940 and lives in Nice (France). She stands charged with having misappropriated several million euros when she worked as a bank employee in Monaco. When first questioned on 6 January 2004, she confessed to misappropriating the money, explaining that she had acted on instructions given over the telephone by unknown voices, and that she had not made any personal profit from her actions. The next day she was charged and remanded in custody. Appeals and requests for her release lodged by the applicant and her counsel were rejected. The appeals were based in particular on the duration of the detention and the applicant’s state of health, which was allegedly incompatible with her continued detention. On 13 December 2007, while the criminal proceedings were in progress, Mrs Prencipe was released “in order to comply with the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights concerning the reasonable length of detention pending trial”.