DISSENT ING OPINION OF JU D GE ZAGREBELSKY , JOINED BY JU D GE SAJÓ

I cannot agree with the majorit y ' s finding that there has been a violation of A rticle 1 of the Protocol No. 1, for the following reasons.

1. The aut h orit i e s legally expropri ated a piece of land belonging to the applicant s and offered them compensation . However , the applicants wanted the aut h orit i es also to take into account the profit they could have made by exploit ing a quarry located on the land in question. They therefore applied to the court to award them a much larger sum . The domestic courts ultimately decided that the applicant s ' claims concern ing the quarry were ill-founded and awarded them a sum similar to the compensation the aut h orit i es had offered them in the administrativ e expropriation proce dure . As their claim had been rejected the applicant s were ordered to pay the court fees , calculated on the basis of the sum at issue in the action the applicant s themselves brought before the courts . The fees concerned amounted to more than the compensation they were awarded .

2. The applicant s claimed that they had ultimately received no compensation for the expropriation of their land . The majorit y acknowledges that although this case origin ated in a de privation of prop erty , the lack of compen sation the applicant s complained of was caus e d by the application of the law governing court fees (paragraph 34 of the judgment ). It was because the applicant s had to pay the court fees thus calculated that the compensation they were awarded was reduced to nothing . As a result, according to the majorit y , the “fair balance” required by A rticle 1 of Protocol No. 1 was not achieved .

3. As I see it, the findings the majorit y reached confuse two different things: the compensation for expropriation and the court fees the applicant s had to pay . Those fees have nothing whatsoever to do with the compensation for expropriation; they arose solely because the applicant s lodged an ill-founded claim concerning a very large sum of money . Had they claimed a still larger sum , the fees would have been even higher . The fact that what the authorities owed the applicant s was offset by what they in turn owed the State is no reason to confuse the two sums , the cr e dit and the d e bt, which to my mind are two completely separate things .

4. The question of court fee s , the crit eri a by which they are determined under P ortug uese law and the resulting amounts could be examin e d as a possible obstacle to access to a court. However, the applicants did not lodge their complaint in those terms. In any event , linking court fee s to the sum at issue in the action brought by the claimant is not a quirk of the P ortug uese system . On the contrary, it is found in other European systems . And it is a form of payment of contributions, within the meaning of the second paragraph of A rticle 1 of Protocol No. 1.