Kate and Gerry McCann were dealt a damaging blow today after a Supreme Court rejected a formal complaint against a ruling which stated they were not innocent in the disappearance of Madeleine.
 

The McCanns have been engaged in a protracted and expensive eight-year legal battle, using money from the Find Madeleine Fund, to silence a detective who authored a book that claimed they faked their daughter's abduction and covered up her death. 
 

Last month, Portugal's Supreme Court upheld a 2016 ruling that Goncalo Amaral's 2008 book 'The Truth of the Lie' was indeed exercising his legal right to freedom of expression.

In February's ruling the judges also declared the lifting of Kate and Gerry's 'arguidos' status (a kind of formal suspect), and the 2008 archiving of the criminal investigation into Maddie's disappearance, did not mean they were innocent.

Lawyers for the McCanns, who have steadfastly claimed Maddie was abducted, described the Supreme Court's assertion as "erroneous" and "frivolous". They immediately laid the formal complaint.

Today, Supreme Court judge Dr Jorge Manuel Roque Nogueira threw that complaint out.

Amaral oversaw the original investigation into Madeleine's disappearance from the family's holiday apartment on May 3, 2007.

The McCanns were made 'arguidos' in the days following a cadaver and blood dog search that saw alerts made inside the family's holiday apartment and also a rental car Kate and Gerry hired 25 days after Maddie vanished.

The cadaver dog, trained to detect the odour of dead bodies, also registered hits on Maddie's favourite cuddly toy, Cuddle Cat, and two items of Kate's clothing.

Amaral was controversially removed from the investigation in October 2007, after he was deemed to have been critical of British police in an interview with a Portuguese newspaper.

The Portuguese detective later wrote a book based on the Madeleine case, and released it three days after the case was officially shelved, which was also when 'arguidos' status was lifted from the McCanns.

Amaral's book theorised Maddie had died in apartment 5A, and her body had been disposed of by Kate and Gerry.

In 2009, the McCanns launched a class action suit against Amaral and won an injunction against his book.

Those legal maneuverings resulted in the freezing of Amaral's assets, and also the immediate seizure of a bounty of his books.

However, in October, 2010, that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in Lisbon, which ruled the injunction had violated Amaral's freedom of expression.

That judgement set the wheels in motion for a showdown that threatened to financially ruin the ex-police chief.

In April 2015 Amaral was ordered to pay $704,000 plus interest in damages.

But with the help of almost $100,000 in donations from his supporters, Amaral challenged the libel ruling and won, at the same time successfully overturning the ban on his book.

 The McCanns quickly lodged an appeal with Portugal's Supreme Court, which was rejected this year in February.

The 76-page ruling by the Supreme Court stated that no one should infer guilt or innocence on the McCanns based on their judgement.

"It should not be said that the appellants [McCanns] were cleared via the ruling announcing the archiving of the criminal case," according to public court documents.

"In truth, that ruling was not made in virtue of Portugal's Public Prosecution Service having acquired the conviction that the appellants hadn't committed a crime.

"The archiving of the case was determined by the fact that public prosecutors hadn't managed to obtain sufficient evidence of the practice of crimes by the appellants."   

Amaral has reportedly authored a second, yet-to-published, book about Madeleine's disappearance.

The McCanns are believed to have one final avenue to challenge today's decision – by lodging an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights.