Background
In 2002, Ukrainian national Yakiv Samanyuk purchased a plot of land from local authorities in the Mykulychyn area to construct and operate a café. He subsequently leased an adjacent plot in 2004 for a summer terrace. Both plots sat near a railway track. The applicant obtained all required approvals and permits, duly registered his title, and openly ran his business on the land for over a decade without objection from any party.
In 2014, following an inspection, the national railway company Ukrzaliznytsya (“the Railways”) initiated court proceedings to invalidate the sale and lease, asserting that both plots fell within the railway exclusion zone — an area reserved for transport infrastructure under Ukrainian law. The central legal dispute was whether the Railways needed a formally registered title to that land, or whether technical construction documentation from the 1950s and 1990s was sufficient to establish their rights. The applicant also contended that the Railways’ claims were time-barred under the three-year statutory limitation period, which he argued should have run from the date of his registered title, not from the 2014 inspection.
After two re-examinations, the Higher Commercial Court ruled in favor of the Railways in final judgments of 20 December 2016 and 24 October 2017, finding that the technical documentation sufficiently classified the land as “land of transport” and that the limitation period ran from the Railways’ 2014 discovery of the alleged violation. The applicant then sought review by the Supreme Court of Ukraine on grounds of divergent application of law, pointing to prior Higher Commercial Court decisions — including cases nos. 926/1018/14 and 926/584/14 — in which the Railways had failed on similar facts because unregistered technical documentation was held insufficient to prove their property rights. The Supreme Court refused to open review proceedings in rulings of 10 March 2017 and 1 March 2018, finding without detailed explanation that the cited cases were not comparable.
The Court’s Holding
The Court unanimously held that there was no violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of property). Although the invalidation of the applicant’s duly registered title plainly constituted an interference with his property rights, the Court found the interference proportionate. Applying its reasoning from the closely analogous Committee judgment in Zvonar v. Ukraine [Committee] (no. 20532/16, 20 November 2025), the Court noted that the land had been sold under a civil-law contract by a local authority acting as a private party, which meant Ukrainian civil law — including its compensatory mechanisms under Articles 216, 390, and 1173 of the Civil Code — provided the applicant with an available and not manifestly ineffective avenue to recover the money paid for the land. Because the applicant neither attempted to use those remedies nor explained why they would have been inadequate or inaccessible, the Court concluded that a fair balance had been struck between his Convention rights and the public interest in protecting railway exclusion zones.
The Court unanimously held that there was a violation of Article 6 § 1 (right to a fair trial) in relation to the Supreme Court’s ruling of 1 March 2018. The Court first confirmed that, at the relevant time, the Supreme Court review procedure on grounds of divergent case-law was an ordinary — not extraordinary — remedy, such that the full guarantees of Article 6 applied to those proceedings. On the merits, Article 6 § 1 requires courts to give reasons for their decisions. The Court found that the applicant had cited earlier Higher Commercial Court judgments that concerned the same legal question (sufficiency of technical documentation to prove railway property rights) and even the same party (the Railways). Despite the obvious factual and legal similarity, the Supreme Court dismissed the divergence argument in summary terms without any detailed explanation — a deficiency the Court described as apparent even to a lay observer. The Supreme Court therefore failed to address pertinent and important arguments, violating Article 6 § 1.
The remaining complaints — concerning the application of the statute of limitations and the alleged disregarding of evidence — were declared inadmissible or found to disclose no appearance of a Convention violation. As the applicant had submitted no claim for just satisfaction, the Court made no pecuniary or non-pecuniary award.
Key Takeaways
- A landowner deprived of property bought in good faith from local authorities does not automatically obtain a remedy under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 if domestic civil law offers a compensatory mechanism that is accessible and not manifestly ineffective — the owner must attempt or explain the unavailability of that remedy.
- Where a national supreme court exercises an ordinary review jurisdiction to resolve divergent case-law, Article 6 § 1 fully applies and requires that court to give adequately reasoned decisions, particularly when the applicant cites factually and legally similar prior judgments involving the same party.
- A summary rejection of a divergence-of-law review request — without explaining why cited comparator cases were not truly comparable — violates the duty to state reasons under Article 6 § 1, even if the court formally acknowledges the cited cases.
- The Court reaffirmed the principle from Drozdyk and Mikula v. Ukraine (nos. 27849/15 and 33358/15, 24 October 2024) that subsequent domestic proceedings ordering demolition without compensation of a bona fide owner’s improvements can itself constitute an excessive burden — a point that informed the Ukrainian courts’ rejection of the Railways’ later demolition claim against the applicant.
Why It Matters
This judgment reinforces a growing line of ECHR authority on the limits of land-reclamation claims by state-owned enterprises in Ukraine. While the Court declined to find a substantive property violation — signaling that domestic compensation routes must genuinely be exhausted before Strasbourg relief is sought — it drew a clear procedural line: supreme courts performing a case-law-harmonization function cannot brush aside well-founded divergence arguments with conclusory reasoning. The ruling puts practical pressure on the Ukrainian Supreme Court to engage substantively with comparator decisions, especially in recurring disputes between Ukrzaliznytsya and private landowners whose titles were registered over land later claimed as railway exclusion zones.
For practitioners, the case illustrates the strategic interplay between Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 6 in property disputes: a claimant who forfeits the substantive property claim by failing to pursue domestic compensation may still succeed on the procedural fairness complaint if the reviewing court gave inadequate reasons. It also clarifies that the availability of post-invalidation civil damages claims is assessed at the proportionality stage of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, not as a preliminary exhaustion-of-remedies bar.