EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION / Alla Tymofeyeva (ed.)

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X. Y. v. the CZECH REPUBLIC

it is really the role of the Court to adjudicate cases such as the case under consid- eration. 19. In addition to the fact that the case under consideration concerns a rather small amount and has apparently been caused by an effort to frustrate the minor offence proceedings and by the subsequent excessive use of various legal reme- dies, the case does not raise any questions that would be relevant from the point of view of the Convention, as the Government shall describe below. On the contrary, it concerns problems that have been unambiguously examined in the Court’s case law on a long-term and consistent basis. 20. In the Government’s opinion, it i s therefore appropriate under the cir- cumstances to consider whether the application should be declared inadmissible pursuant to Article 35 §§ 3 and 4 of the Convention for an abuse of the right of application (see mutatis mutandis the decision in the case of Bock v. Germany , cited above). 21. In case the Court does not accept this plea of the inadmissibility of the application as a whole, the Government shall present their opinion on the admis- sibility of the individual parts of the application in the following parts of these Observations. (ii) On the admissibility of the application in relation to the minor offence proceedings 22. The Government would note that in compliance with the Court’s case law, minor offence proceedings have to be regarded as “criminal” wit hin the meaning of Article 6 of the Convention, which is thus applicable to these proceed- ings (see Lauko v. Slovakia , no. 26138/95, judgment of 2 September 1998, §§ 56 to 59). 23. In the case under consideration, the proceedings did not reach the stage of proceedings before a court, because the Applicant did not lodge an appeal against the decision of DD/MM/YY, although he could and should have done so, and he also did not bring an action before a court subsequently. He only filed a petition for the reopening of the proceedings, which was an incorrect step, as the Government shall explain below. The Applicant also failed to bring an administra- tive action against the administrative authorities ’ rejecting decision in these pro- ceedings. Therefore, in the Government ’s opinion, the application is inadmissible either for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies, or for being late. a) Inadmissibility plea on the grounds of non-exhaustion of all domestic remedies 24. In the first place the Government argue that the complaint of a violation of Article 6 of the Convention, which was allegedly caused by non-service of the decision on the minor offence of DD/MM/YY, is inadmissible for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies.

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