JOINT DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGES PASTOR RIDRUEJO, BONELLO, TULKENS, STRÁŽNICKÁ, LORENZEN, FISCHBACH AND CASADEVALL

1. We regret that we are unable to share the opinion of the majority that there has been no violation of Article 8 in this case. We refer to our joint dissenting opinion in the case of Chapman v. the United Kingdom (no. 27238, judgment of 18 January 2001), the leading case of the five applications brought before our Court concerning the problems experienced by gypsies in the United Kingdom.

2. Identical considerations arise in this application. These applicant gypsies had followed an itinerant lifestyle for many years on the Maidstone area, stopping on temporary or unofficial sites and being increasingly moved on by police and local authority officials due to the increasing shortage of stopping places. Due to concerns about the education of the children and the lack of any authorised site, the applicants reluctantly went into a local authority flat in 1988 but finding the lifestyle alien, they bought land on which to return to life in a caravan. Planning permission was however refused for this and they were required to leave. Numerous enforcement measures were taken against them. The applicants were prosecuted in 1989, 1990 (fined, with costs), 1992 (fined) and faced injunction proceedings in 1992, which forced them to leave their land until December 1992. They were fined again in 1994 and faced injunction proceedings in 1993-1994, substituted by a section 178 procedure in 1996, whereby the local authority intended to enter their land and take the steps necessary to implement the enforcement notices (see paragraph 42 above). Following the last threatened measure, they again took Council housing accommodation in 1997, due to the lack of any lawful place to site their caravan in the area. The applicants’ health was adversely affected by this type of lifestyle.

During the planning procedures there was no indication that there were any alternative sites available for the applicants to go to either in the district or in the county as a whole. While the Government referred in general terms to official sites existing in the area and said that the applicants were free to seek sites outside the county, it is apparent that, notwithstanding the statistics relied on by the Government (see paragraph 67), there was still a significant shortfall of official, lawful sites available for gypsies in the country as a whole and that it could not be taken for granted that vacancies existed or were available elsewhere.

3. Consequently, the measures taken to evict the applicants from their home on their own land, in circumstances where there has not been shown to be any other lawful, alternative site reasonably open to them, were, in our view, disproportionate and disclosed a violation of Article 8 of the Convention.

4. We voted for non-violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 14 as, in light of our firm conviction that Article 8 had been violated in the circumstances of this case, no separate issues remained to be examined.

SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE BONELLO

I refer to the terms of my separate opinion in the Chapman v. the United Kingdom judgment of this date.

[1] Notes by the Registry

. Protocol No. 11 came into force on 1 November 1998.

[2] . The full text of the Commission’s opinion and of the separate opinions contained in the report will be reproduced as an annex to the final printed version of the judgment (in the official reports of selected judgments and decisions of the Court), but in the meantime a copy of the Commission’s report is obtainable from the Registry.