CYIL 2015

THE CZECH REPUBLIC BEFORE THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN 2014 the applicant with written information. Hence, the involuntary medication was not established beyond reasonable doubt. The applicant also alleged that his criminal complaint had not been duly investigated and the prosecuting authorities had relied on the findings of civil courts. The Court confirmed that, in the absence of wilful ill-treatment, the State’s positive obligation to investigate could have been complied with through a civil action as well. The applicant had filed such an action; the action was debated in adversarial proceedings and within a reasonable time. In consequence, there was no violation of procedural obligations stemming from Article 3 or 13 of the Convention either. 3. Property Although it is usually supposed that a problem consists in money only at first, let us justify why we mention property at the end, despite the fact that the Court’s judgment on rent control in the Czech Republic would have been a major event if it had been delivered much earlier. When the Court adopted pilot judgments 9 in the case of Hutten-Czapska v. Poland (no. 35014/97, judgment of 22 February 2005 and judgment [GC] of 19 June 2006), Czech landlords felt encouraged by such a development and started to file a number of applications 10 against persisting rent control, which had been declared unconstitutional several times by the Constitutional Court, basically for not taking into account the impossibility of landlords to accumulate money during the Communist regime to be invested in the houses, and remained in force, as it was impossible to increase rents. The Constitutional Court also enabled landlords to request a rent increase via a court decision, this legal avenue being further supplemented by a possibility to sue the State for compensation for involuntary limitation of the right to property. Parliament finally adopted an act allowing landlords gradually and unilaterally to increase rents since 2007 and repeatedly amended the relevant provisions of the Civil Code, too. 11 The Court initially intended to respond to the call of Czech landlords by a pilot-judgment procedure and communicated a first group of applications to the Government in 2007. Without any decision on the admissibility of the first group, it went on to communicate another group of cases in 2011. After the Court’s decision in the cases of Vomočil and Art 38, a.s. v. the Czech Republic (nos. 38817/04 and 1458/07, decision of 5 March 2013) 12 terminating the first group, it became apparent that the Court not only required the applicants to exhaust domestic remedies, including a constitutional appeal, in spite of doubts as to their effectiveness, but had 9 For a later definition of the pilot-judgment procedure, see Rule 61 of the Rules of Court. 10 In total there were several thousands of applicants, the overwhelming majority of them having only signed a form and joined an organised way of submitting the case of Czech rent control to the Court. 11 The first amongst relevant acts was Act no. 107/2006 on unilateral rent increases. 12 A voluminous overview of national legislation and case law is annexed to this decision.

409