CYIL 2015

ALLA TYMOFEYEVA CYIL 6 ȍ2015Ȏ to return the building to the applicant or, failing that, to pay him EUR 1,900,000 (one million, nine hundred thousand euros) in respect of pecuniary damages. Given the different material basis of legal and natural persons, it becomes clear that for the Court the rights of legal persons are not more important than the rights of natural persons. They just lose more, and consequently, the awards are higher. It is possible to say, almost for sure, that the authors of the Convention, when writing the Convention, did not plan to compensate the financial risks of corporations. Nonetheless, the right to property may have a number of forms. A person may own a car, a flat or a company. Non-protection of the property rights of the owners of businesses would be discriminatory. Therefore, in the end, the Court also offered protection to legal persons. Moreover, the notion of A 1 P-1 precisely requires it. 71 The highest amounts are unsurprisingly awarded in relation to a breach of this provision. Businesses, being a grouping of individuals, possess bigger capital and at the same time their losses could be higher. It would probably be reasonable to determine limits to the maximum amount of just satisfaction awards applied to legal persons. The criteria for restriction of such amounts require conducting serious economic research in all 47 member states. They must also take into account situations where an applicant company is a foreigner in the respondent state, the number of shareholders it has and many others factors. On the other hand, when we already now have judgments with awards of almost two billion euros, the limited reward could not be smaller. Consequently, introduction of limitations would hardly solve the problem. Anyhow, it would be of use to set up the tables with average amounts of compensation provided by the Court under each type of violation. The tables should be accompanied with comprehensive explanations on the criteria for giving such an amount and with references to the related Court’s case-law. Conclusions Analysis of the sources related to the question demonstrates that the term ‘just satisfaction’ is not the same as the notion ‘satisfaction’ in the DARS and may comprise all the types of reparation. The given study illuminates the fact that the Convention not only provides legal persons with protection of their human rights, but also that the awards received by them are of an outstanding nature. The table produced by the author shows that just satisfaction includes not only compensation of pecuniary 71 Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 reads: “Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law. The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a State to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties.”

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