CYIL 2015

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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.

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.

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

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.

For an overview, see

Zpráva za rok 2014 o stavu vyřizování stížností podaných proti

České

republice

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).