CYIL vol. 9 (2018)

VÍT ALEXANDER SCHORM CYIL 9 ȍ2018Ȏ appropriate redress. The application of Skupa v. the Czech Republic (no. 30700/13, decision of 26 September 2017) was rejected for abuse of the right of petition since the applicant had not informed the Court of compensation awarded by the State; this was not the first time in the Court’s case law regarding the Czech Republic that it had decided this way. 12 The last of the group of inadmissible cases, that of Šlechta v. the Czech Republic (no. 29056/13, decision of 26 September 2017), concerned the right of access to court with regard to the obligation to pay (reduced) court fees by an individual who had been undergoing bankruptcy proceedings and sued for damages allegedly caused to him in these proceedings by both the bankruptcy court and administrator. The application was rejected for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies. Right to property In 2017, the Court finally decided on just satisfaction in four cases in which it had held, three to four years earlier, that there had been a violation of Article 1 of Protocol no. 1 to the Convention and that the question of application of Article 41 of the Convention was not ready for adjudication. Apart from the time which had lapsed since the delivery of the principal judgment, 13 what these cases have in common is that a friendly settlement could not have been agreed upon as the Government had been discouraged from going in that direction by the applicants’ behaviour which, in other circumstances, would have been deemed abusive. Three of them concerned the remaining rent-control cases ( Čapský and Jeschkeová v. the Czech Republic , nos. 25784/09 and 36002/09, judgment on just satisfaction of 9 February 2017; Heldenburg v. the Czech Republic , no. 65546/09, judgment on just satisfaction of the same day; the principal judgment in these cases being R & L, s.r.o. and others v. the Czech Republic , nos. 37926/05, 25784/09, 36002/09, 44410/09 and 65546/09, judgment on the merits of 3 July 2014) and the fourth concerned the issue of restitution of real property whose confiscation under the Communist regime had not been clearly entered into the land register ( Žáková v. the Czech Republic , no. 2000/09, judgment on the merits of 3 October 2013, judgment on just satisfaction of 6 April 2017). Based on the provision of Article 39 § 2 of the Convention, the Government considered that in the absence of contrary provisions, the rule of confidentiality of friendly settlement negotiations was fully applicable even after the pronouncement of a principal judgment, and its breach justified declaring the application inadmissible for abuse of the right of petition under Article 35 § 3 of the Convention. The applicants (or their legal counsel whose action is usually attributable to their clients) had all communicated either with the Court, or with other national authorities or even with the media on the progress of the respective friendly settlement negotiations and criticised the Government’s position. The Court started by confirming all the applicable principles of the rule of confidentiality in question, including its absolute character and the risk run by applicants of seeing their application declared inadmissible when they breach this rule. The Court’s reasoning placed 2. 12 Hadrabová and others v. the Czech Republic (nos. 42165/02 and 466/03, decision of 25 September 2007) and Dostál v. the Czech Republic (nos. 19057/02 and 7772/03, decision of 23 October 2007). 13 A judgment on the merits in which the Court found a violation of the Convention and reserved the question of just satisfaction inviting the parties to submit written observations on that outstanding issue and to notify the Court of any agreement they might reach.

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