CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

VÍT ALEXANDER SCHORM CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ the scale the Court uses to measure this criterion. 3 The majority of them indeed represent cases similar to those decided previously. This does not mean that no eye-catching aspects can be found in these cases at all. This article will attempt to highlight some relevant and not necessarily dull points where they can be discerned. The above limited numbers need to be seen against the background of some 333 applications declared inadmissible by a single judge during the year in reference and the previously mentioned insignificant nature of the 2018 Strasbourg case law regarding the Czech Republic against the background of stimulating cases that had been communicated in the past and remained simply pending. Still, the Czech Republic, unlike a dozen of high case account States, does not pose any problem to the Convention mechanism which has, however, continued to face a huge backlog of cases. 4 Only seven new applications were communicated to the Czech Government in 2018. As of 31 December 2018, there were exactly 100 applications against the Czech Republic awaiting judicial assessment at the Court. 5 The applications adjudicated in 2018 in the form of public decisions 6 concerned a range of substantive provisions of Convention law, namely the right to life and the right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment guaranteed respectively by Articles 2 and 3, the right to a fair trial safeguarded by Article 6, the right to respect for private and family life under Article 8, the right to an effective remedy provided for by Article 13 of the Convention, and the protection of property under Article 1 of Protocol no. 1 to the Convention. In total, fourteen applications were decided on the merits in four judgments, all of which established a violation of the Convention, and two previously communicated applications were declared inadmissible. Nonetheless, the structure of this article will adopt a different logic. We shall start with the most dramatic of the cases where the life of a toddler was seriously endangered by her mother, and continue with a case where the legal father of an adult woman wished finally to deny his paternity. Two other chapters will be devoted to cases stemming from the phenomenon of length of proceedings on one hand and to real clones of previous cases against the Czech Republic on the other hand. 1. Prevention and investigation of violent acts committed within a family Probably the most riveting of the Czech cases decided in 2018, which concerned the rights of a very small child to life and not to be subjected to inhuman treatment in their procedural aspect, was declared inadmissible for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies. The case of Polcarová v. the Czech Republic (no. 52256/15, committee decision of 15 May 2018) 3 There are four levels: key cases, selected as such by the Bureau of the Court on the proposal of the Jurisconsult, then cases of 1) high importance, which make a significant contribution to the development, clarification or modification of the case law, of 2) medium importance, which go beyond merely applying existing case law, and of 3) low importance. 4 The number of pending applications, compared between the end of 2017 and the end of 2018, remained stable at the level of more than 56,000. See Analysis of statistics 2018 (established by the Court in January 2019, p. 6 and 8, available at: https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Stats_analysis_2018_ENG.pdf). 5 All these numbers are based either on the annual report of the Government Agent for 2018 ( Zpráva za rok 2018 o stavu vyřizování stížností podaných proti České republice k mezinárodním orgánům ochrany lidských práv , May 2019, available at: https://justice.cz/web/msp/zpravy-o-cinnosti) or on the Analysis of statistics 2018 , cited above, p. 24. 6 For explanation, see footnote 2.

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