CYIL vol. 9 (2018)

CYIL 9 ȍ2018Ȏ THE CZECH REPUBLIC BEFORE THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN 2017 1.3 Access to court The subject-matter of the only judgment finding a violation, rendered in the case of Beránek v. the Czech Republic (no. 45758/14, judgment of 5 October 2017), consisted of an error committed by the judge-rapporteur of the Constitutional Court in checking the end of the statutory time-limit for filing a constitutional appeal when he declared the appeal inadmissible for being lodged after the expiration of the prescribed filing deadline. The Czech legal order lays down a principle according to which if the applicable two-month time-limit for lodging a constitutional appeal expires on a national holiday, the next working day following the holiday is the last day of that time-limit. 9 The judge simply disregarded the fact that 28 October 2013 was a national holiday celebrated every year, established to commemorate the creation of an independent Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. After the delivery of the judgment a question arose whether, within the general measures of its execution, applicable legislation or decision-making practice needs to be amended; indeed, the Code of Civil Procedure, applicable by default, explicitly only enables rectification of clerical errors while a situation in which a rectification, even of an evident inaccuracy, would lead to a totally different decision, is qualitatively different. After a debate by qualified experts, that question was answered in the negative, although a similar problem had appeared in the applications filed against the Czech Republic to the Court for the second time 10 and trivialities of this kind should not be dealt with by an international court. Admittedly, no- one is infallible and after all, two detected cases of error in the twenty-five-year history of the Czech Constitutional Court seem to be rather infrequent. It must be added that the case before the Court could not have been solved by a friendly settlement and that the plenary of the Constitutional Court granted the applicant’s request for re-opening the proceedings on his initial constitutional appeal, but declared that appeal manifestly ill-founded. 11 1.4 Inadmissible applications It is worth noting that in 2017, the Court declared five applications invoking mainly Article 6 § 1 of the Convention inadmissible. Four of these cases had their basis in the excessive length of judicial proceedings and concerned the adequacy of the proceedings in compensation for that excessive length, proceedings which themselves sometimes turned to be too lengthy. In DOMIRA, spol. s r.o. v. the Czech Republic (no. 60702/11, decision of 7 March 2017), the Court held that the applicant company had been sufficiently compensated for the duration of the main proceedings and that the compensation proceedings had not suffered from excessive length. In Meluzínová v. the Czech Republic (no. 59633/12, same decision as the previous one), the compensation proceedings had been affected by excessive length, but the applicant had requested and was afforded additional redress on this account. The applicant in Zaňko v. the Czech Republic (no. 16782/15, decision of 15 June 2017) had concluded a friendly settlement with the State and later sought further compensation for the time taken by the compensation proceedings, but the Court found the amount paid to her sufficient to ensure 9 See also the Constitutional Court’s plenary judgment no. Pl. ÚS 33/97 of 17 December 1997, published in the Collection of Laws under no. 30/1998 Sb., which made that principle a rule which may only accept exceptions explicitly laid down by law. 10 Zemanová v. the Czech Republic , no. 6019/13, judgment of 13 December 2005. 11 Decisions no. Pl.ÚS 22/18 of 22 May and 10 July 2018.

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