CYIL 2015

VÍT ALEXANDER SCHORM CYIL 6 ȍ2015Ȏ also revised its intention to go for a pilot judgment. If the applicants had not used domestic remedies, and ultimately the constitutional appeal, their applications were declared inadmissible, which was the case of almost all these applications. Awaited for a long time, the judgment in R & L, s.r.o. and others (nos. 37926/05 and others, judgment of 3 July 2014), i.e. in the second group of rent control cases, in fact confirmed what had looked as a probable outcome after the admissibility decision in Vomočil and Art 38, a.s. , but which was quite unforeseeable eight or nine years ago. In its judgment, the Court first maintained, for the purposes of the rule of exhaustion, that the two remedies, i.e. the action against the tenant for rent increase and the action for compensation against the State, are alternative, and not cumulative, as nonetheless suggested by the Constitutional Court, in whose concept the latter action was subsidiary in nature. 13 It further rejected the Government’s opinion that the landlords, when they acquired the property, were perfectly aware of the implications of the rent control scheme, and emphasized that they only denounce the situation that obtained after the Constitutional Court’s first judgment of 2000 on the unconstitutionality of the rent regulations when they were owners. It held that there was interference with the landlords’ property within the meaning of the third sentence of Article 1 of Protocol no. 1 ( i.e. control of the use of property). The Court went on to verify the existence of a legal basis for the interference, which made it refer to the Constitutional Court’s findings according to which it was essentially up to Parliament to regulate rents, not to the Government (the Ministry of Finance), that had been doing it, and Parliament’s persisting inactivity was unconstitutional in itself. The legal vacuum ended with the possibility based on Act no. 107/2006 for the landlords to increase rents. In sum, the interference in the period from 2002, when Parliament should have adopted the necessary legislation as decided previously by the Constitutional Court, to 2006 (both years included) lacked appropriate legal basis and was therefore contrary to Article 1 of Protocol no. 1. It is to be observed that the Court’s judgment stops at the level of legality, while virtually all the other rent control cases against different States (Poland, Malta, Slovakia or Croatia) have been examined at the level of proportionality. Since the Court reserved, by six votes to one, the question of just satisfaction for further procedure, it remains unclear what standards or criteria should be applied in order to evaluate the extent to which compensation is due from the State.

13 In fact, it is the Court’s established case law that in case of different remedies available which can lead to the same result, only one of these needs to be exhausted for the purposes of Article 35 § 1 of the Convention. It is nevertheless a question of whether we are not in a situation of an aggregate of remedies.

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