Madeleine McCann's parents have lost a court case arising from claims in a bestselling book by a former detective implicating them in their daughter's abduction
Mr Amaral was ordered to pay the McCanns €500,000 in libel damages by a Lisbon court in 2015, but the decision was overturned and then thrown out by the Portuguese Supreme Court in 2017.Madeleine McCann's parents mark 15 years since her disappearance with Winnie the Pooh quote
In the latest ruling, the ECHR said:"The court considered that, even assuming that the applicants' reputation had been damaged, this was not on account of the argument put forward by the book's author but rather as a result of the suspicions expressed against them, which had led to their being placed under investigation in the course of the criminal investigation and had led to intense media attention and much controversy.
"The information had thus been brought to the public's attention in some detail even before the investigation file was made available to the media and the book in question was published. "It followed that the national authorities had not failed in their positive obligation to protect the applicants' right to respect for their private life."Earlier this year the man suspected of abducting Madeleinehaving sex in his camper van with a young woman who would back his alibi.
Christian B says he drove her to the airport at Faro for a flight home the next day and they were stopped and photographed at a police roadblock.