NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

following analyses will always involve a combination of the right to effective remedy together with other material rights applicable to non-governmental organisations under this treaty. We are going to start with the first possible combination relevant to Article 34 NGOs, namely, alleged breaches of Article 13 of the Convention taken together with Article 6 of the Convention. 2.8.2 Article 13 in conjunction with Article 6 § 1 of the Convention Very often, in their applications, claimants allege a breach of Article 13 together with Article 6 of the Convention. Previously, Article 6 § 1 was deemed to constitute a lex specialis in relation to Article 13, therefore, the latter was not considered by the Court when it found that Article 6 had been violated. 1024 The situation changed with the Grand Chamber judgment in the case of Kudła v. Poland. 1025 Here, the Court noted that “the time has come to review its case-law in the light of the continuing accumulation of applications before it in which the only, or principal, allegation is that of a failure to ensure a hearing within a reasonable time in breach of Article 6 § 1. The growing frequency with which violations in this regard are being found has recently led the Court to draw attention to ‘the important danger’ that exists for the rule of law within national legal orders when ‘excessive delays in the administration of justice’ occur ‘in respect of which litigants have no domestic remedy’”. 1026 In view of these conclusions, the Court decided that the question of whether the applicant benefited from trial within a reasonable time in the determination of civil rights and obligations or a criminal charge is a separate legal issue from that of whether domestic law provided the applicant with an effective remedy to ventilate a complaint on that ground. Therefore, notwithstanding its earlier finding of a violation of Article 6 § 1 for failure to try within a reasonable time, the Court later held that there had been a violation of Article 13 of the Convention in that the applicant had no domestic remedy whereby he could enforce his right to a ‘hearing within a reasonable time’. 1027 In the case of Sylenok and Tekhnoservis-Plus v. Ukraine, 1028 a Ukrainian company Tekhnoservis-Plus alleged that a judgment in its favour had remained unenforced for a significant period of time (under Article 6) and that the company had no effective remedy in this regard. 1029 It relied, inter alia , on Article 13 of the Convention. The Court came to conclusion that the applicant company did not have an effective domestic remedy, as required by Article 13 of the Convention, whereby it could have obtained a ruling upholding its right to have its claims finally settled within a reasonable time, as guaranteed by Article 6 § 1 of the Convention. Therefore, the Court declared a breach of this provision.

1024 Tre Traktörer AB v. Sweden , 7 July 1989, § 51, Series a no. 159. 1025 Kudła v. Poland [GC], no. 30210/96, ECHR 2000-XI. 1026 Ibid. , § 148. 1027 Kudła [GC], cited above, § 160. 1028 Sylenok and Tekhnoservis-Plus , cited above.

1029 KUCHIN’KA, O., FULEY, T., BARANNIK, R. Printsipi krimínal’nogo provadzhennya u svítlí praktiki Evropeys’kogo sudu z prav lyudini : monografíya / O. P. Kuchins’ka, T. Í. Fuley, R. V. Baranník. – Nízhin : TOV Vidavnitstvo “Aspekt- Polígraf”, 2013, p. 76.

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