NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

The applicant company was put at a substantial disadvantage vis-а-vis the bank, 599 and the Court found an infringement of Article 6 of the Convention. An Article 34 NGO complained of violations of equality of arms principle in the case of Ringier Axel Springer Slovakia, a. s. v. Slovakia . 600 The applicant in the present case was the Ringier Axel Springer Slovakia, a.s., a Slovak multimedia publishing company based in Bratislava. The events complained of concerned the applicant’s legal predecessor, company A. On 14 June 1999, a reporter employed by A. received an anonymous call informing him that a member of parliament, who was also a municipal mayor and the president of a political party, had urinated from the terrace of a public restaurant together with the police vice-president. A few minutes after the call, the reporter arrived at the restaurant. He took a photograph of the terrace and interviewed a waitress and some of the people eating at the restaurant. Beginning on 16 June 1999, several articles were published by A. in a popular national newspaper, in relation to the alleged incident at the restaurant. One of the articles alleged that the police vice-president had wet his trousers while sitting on a chair in the restaurant during the evening in question. A. was subsequently sued for libel by both the police vice-president and the politician. The case before the Court concerned only the action taken by the police vice-president. The Slovakian courts found in his favour and ordered A. to publish a correction and an apology, and to pay compensation. The applicant company complained that the proceedings had been unfair in that the judgments were one-sided in favour of the claimant. The Court found that the judgments were supported by reasons which were contradictory, and as such inadequate, and that the principle of equality of arms had not been respected in the proceedings, because new evidence (the claimant’s additional submission) had been taken without being proposed to the parties. However, the Court noted that the substantive outcome of the action was not affected by the taking of additional evidence at the appellate stage, which solely concerned the ruling on damages. Accordingly, it concluded that the facts of the case did not disclose any appearance of a violation of Article 6 § 1 of the Convention. Among the other cases in which Article 34 NGOs invoked a breach of the equality of arms principle are HIT d.d. Nova Gorica v. Slovenia 601 and Grande Stevens and Others v. Italy . 602 The next issue, which to considerable extent appears in the applications of non-governmental organisations within the meaning of Article 34, is complaints about unreasonable length of the proceedings. 2.2.5 Length of the proceedings One of the most frequently alleged violations under Article 6 of the Convention is the length of the proceedings. The process must be conducted within a ‘reasonable time’, but neither the text of the Convention nor even the case-law contain any exact time 599 JAYAWICKRAMA, N. The judicial application of human rights law : national, regional and international jurisprudence . New York : Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 507. 600 Ringier Axel Springer Slovakia, a. s. v. Slovakia , no. 41262/05, § 111, 26 July 2011. 601 HIT d.d. Nova Gorica , cited above, § 18. 602 Grande Stevens, cited above, § 109.

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