Information Note on the Court’s case-law 18

May 2000

Loulmet, Foussard, Fabre, Frebeau and Sarrazac v. France (dec.) - 51618/99, 51609/99, 51620/99 et al.

Decision 16.5.2000 [Section III]

Article 35

Article 35-1

Exhaustion of domestic remedies

Members of association which represented throughout the whole domestic proceedings presenting their case to the Court as individuals: inadmissible

The applicants were formerly members of an association set up to challenge a decree of May 1994 in which the Conseil d’Etat had declared that the construction of a new motorway section would be in the public interest. Each of the applicants was the owner of property adjoining the line of the future motorway. In June 1994 the association and a joint committee formed by a number of municipalities to work for improvement of the road network and protection of the environment lodged an application to have the decree set aside. The members of the association had unanimously agreed not to submit a collection of individual applications but to support a common one. In October 1998 the Conseil d’Etat dismissed the application to set aside. The association, which had been set up for the s ole purpose of bringing those proceedings, was wound up after the Conseil d’Etat had given judgment.

Inadmissible under Article 6 § 1: Only the association had lodged an application to set aside the decree in issue, and the applicants had not intervened at all in the proceedings before the Conseil d’Etat . Consequently, they could not be considered to have exhausted the remedies available to them under French law. Furthermore, the applicants had asserted that the association could not apply to the Court itse lf because it had ceased its activities when the Conseil d’Etat had given judgment. That argument could not be validly put forward to justify applications to the Court by individual applicants who had been neither parties to nor interveners in the domestic proceedings, since it was precisely by the decision of the association’s members, including the applicants, that the association had ceased its activities. Moreover, the applicants had not sought compensation in the domestic courts for the potential loss of value of their properties as they would have been entitled to do on the ground of abnormal and special damage. The applicants had therefore not exhausted domestic remedies on that point: non-exhaustion.

© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Right s This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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