Legal summary

March 2023

Szaxon v. Hungary (dec.) - 54421/21

Decision 21.3.2023 [Section I]

Article 35

Article 35-1

Exhaustion of domestic remedies

New compensatory remedy for the protractedness of civil proceedings effective and requiring exhaustion: inadmissible

Facts – On 1 January 2022 Act no. XCIV of 2021 on the Enforcement of Pecuniary Satisfaction Relating to the Protractedness of Civil Contentious Proceedings (“the Act”) entered into force. It introduced a compensatory remedy for the protractedness of civil proceedings in response to the Court’s pilot judgment in the case of Gazsó v. Hungary.

In an application lodged in October 2021 the applicant complained under Articles 6 § 1 and 13 of the Convention of the protractedness of civil proceedings (divorce) to which he had been a party and the lack of an effective domestic remedy therefor.

Law – Art 35 § 1: The Court had to examine whether the new compensatory remedy was effective and, if so, whether the applicant had complied with the requirement to exhaust domestic remedies.

(a) Assessment of the 2021 Act – Since 1 January 2022, under the Act, a pecuniary remedy had been available to parties to contentious civil court proceedings that had ended in a final and binding decision and whose right to a hearing within a reasonable time had been violated, entitling them to compensation. In assessing the reasonableness of the length of proceedings the national authorities were required by the Act to look at the criteria established by the Court’s case-law. In addition, under the transitional provisions an individual whose application had been lodged and registered with the Court in respect of the alleged protractedness of court proceedings, but had not yet been decided as at the date of the Act’s entry into force could, within four months, also lodge a claim for damages, unless at the time of the submission of the application with the Court the time-limit applicable under Article 35 § 1 of the Convention had already expired. Furthermore, parties to the domestic proceedings had to exhaust a procedural objection in respect of delays attributable to a domestic court as a prerequisite for such periods to be taken into account when calculating the amount in compensation to be awarded. The domestic courts were to apply that requirement on a case-by-case basis, with careful consideration, and in particular, to take into account the fact that parties to domestic proceedings before 1 January 2022 could not have been aware of this requirement for the purposes of the Act. In the light of the relevant domestic law, the Court was satisfied that that requirement whose application reflected the Court’s case-law, did not render ineffective a priori the remedy provided by the Act.

Accordingly, the Court was satisfied that the Act provided a remedy that was compensatory in nature, guaranteeing in principle genuine redress for Convention violations originating in the protractedness of contentious civil proceedings.

(b) Exhaustion of domestic remedies – There was no compelling reason to deem the new remedy to be ineffective. Relevant domestic case-law in respect of the application of the Act, which was publicly available, demonstrated that the remedy was functioning, dispelled doubts about the application of the aforementioned procedural objection and attested to compensation proceedings being concluded in a timely manner. As to the sufficiency of the amount of compensation awarded under the Act, having regard to economic realities, the daily tariff of about 1 euro per day for the protracted period (multiplied by the number of calendar days falling within the calculable period under the Act), was acceptable within the Hungarian context. Under the Code of Civil Procedure, if compensation was awarded, the judge must invite the State to make the payment within a time-limit of fifteen days from the date on which the decision had been served.

The Act allowed for compensation to be awarded in respect of delays in proceedings before the Kúria that lasted for more than twelve months. Although a claimant pursuing a constitutional claim was excluded from the compensation scheme, that did not render the remedy ineffective, as the Constitutional Court’s role as guardian of the Constitution sometimes made it particularly necessary for it to take into account considerations other than the mere chronological order in which cases were entered on its list of cases such as the nature of a case and its importance in political and social terms.

In view of the foregoing, basing its conclusions on an assessment of the legislative provisions and the available domestic practice, the Court was satisfied that the compensatory remedy provided by the Act was an effective remedy, capable of affording adequate redress for any violation that had already occurred.

In respect of the applicant’s situation, the Act’s transitional provision applied and the remedy had been available to him for four months following the entry into force of the Act. Although he had lodged his application before the Act had come into force and therefore, at the time, he had not had an effective remedy under domestic law in respect of his length-of-proceedings complaint, the circumstances of the present case justified a departure from the general principle of assessing the exhaustion of domestic remedies with reference to the date of the lodging of the application. The purpose of the remedy had been to enable the respondent State to redress breaches of the “reasonable time” requirement and, purportedly, to reduce the number of applications for the Court to consider; not only applications lodged after the date on which the Act came into force, but also those which had been already on the Court’s list of cases by that date, as evident by the transitional provisions. The relevant provision afforded Hungarian litigants a genuine opportunity to obtain redress for their grievances at the national level; in principle, it was for them to avail themselves of that opportunity.

In conclusion, the applicant had been required by Article 35 § 1 to lodge a claim under the relevant sections of the Act and there did not appear to be any exceptional circumstances capable of exempting him from the obligation to exhaust the available domestic remedies.

Conclusion : inadmissible (non-exhaustion of domestic remedies).

Consequently, the Court declared inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded the applicant’s complaint under Article 13.

(See also Gazsó v. Hungary , 48322/12, 16 July 2015, Legal Summary ).

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

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