CYIL 2015

THE CZECH REPUBLIC BEFORE THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN 2014 Meanwhile, in 2014, the Court mainly dealt with various substantive and procedural aspects of the rights protected under Article 8 of the Convention, be it under the head of private or family life, and even the only case which resulted in a judgment under Article 3 of the Convention could have been analysed also in part from the perspective of Article 8. The only truly different meritorious issue adjudicated in 2014 was based on Article 1 of Protocol no. 1 to the Convention. The remaining complaints under various provisions (namely Articles 3, 6, 8, 13 and 14 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol no. 1) were declared inadmissible, in one case a friendly settlement was reached and another application was resolved on the basis of a unilateral declaration of the Government, which proves that the Czech Republic uses alternative ways of ending disputes before the Court where appropriate. 4 Therefore, the overall picture to be associated with the Czech Republic is certainly that of a “normal” contracting State which contributes only to the appropriate and rather little extent to the still large numbers of applications pending before the Court as a whole. This article will not evoke some other events between Strasbourg and the Czech Republic. Apart from a short visit of the President of the Court in Prague and Brno in April 2014, we shall even not describe freshly communicated cases, as it is difficult for the author to assess their prospects of success publicly. Also in order to simplify the situation and keep the article short, we shall not deal with applications or complaints declared inadmissible. 5 In an attempt to provide a balanced overview of the case law in the circumstances, we shall employ broad and less precise categories such as “family”, “privacy” and “property”, bearing in mind that the first two of them deliberately do not exactly correspond to the notions of “family life” and “private life”. 1. Family In 2014 the Court decided three cases turning around child birth in which it gave two judgments, on the one hand, and two cases concerning disputes over contacts with older but still under age children, on the other. However, unlike the issues of outpatient or out-of-hospital delivery, which are almost unprecedented in the Court’s case law, and certainly so vis-à-vis the Czech Republic, the Court has already adjudicated a lot of applications denouncing alleged failures of public authorities to secure contacts between biological parents and their

4 See e.g. point E.1 of the follow-up plan contained in the Declaration adopted at the High Level Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights in Izmir, 27 April 2011. 5 For an overview, see Zpráva za rok 2014 o stavu vyřizování stížností podaných proti České republice k Evropskému soudu pro lidská práva , presented by the Minister of Justice and the Government Agent to the Government of the Czech Republic (the Government’s meeting of 3 June 2015).

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