Background
Nineteen Slovak applicants were parties to long-running administrative restitution proceedings before the Komárno Land Office, which began on 23 December 2004. The proceedings formed part of a larger restitution claim initially lodged by 174 plaintiffs — a group that grew to 345 over the course of the dispute. The same underlying proceedings had already been the subject of two earlier Strasbourg judgments finding violations: Balogh and Others v. Slovakia (no. 35142/15, 31 August 2018) and Balogh and Others v. Slovakia [Committee] (nos. 7918/19 and 43062/20, 16 December 2021), which concerned different applicants in the same domestic case.
Following the Nitra Regional Court’s decision of 9 December 2019 quashing an earlier Land Office decision, the merits of the case remained pending before the Komárno Land Office. Separate cost proceedings before the Regional Court concluded on 5 March 2020. On 1 March 2021 the applicants lodged a constitutional complaint alleging, among other things, excessive length of proceedings before both the Land Office and the Regional Court. The Constitutional Court rejected that complaint on 30 June 2022: it dismissed the part directed at the Regional Court as belated (those proceedings had already ended) and declined jurisdiction over the Land Office proceedings, directing the applicants to pursue an administrative action for acceleration instead.
At the time of the Strasbourg judgment, the restitution proceedings remained pending before the Komárno Land Office — more than 21 years after they commenced, across two levels of jurisdiction.
The Court’s Holding
The Court unanimously declared the application admissible and found violations of both Article 6 § 1 and Article 13 of the Convention. On Article 6 § 1, the Court rejected the Government’s argument that two periods during which the case was before the Supreme Court should be excluded from the assessment on the ground that the applicants’ constitutional complaint had not been directed at that court. Applying the principle that exhaustion of domestic remedies must be assessed with flexibility and without excessive formalism, the Court noted that a constitutional complaint directed at the Supreme Court would in any event have been rejected as belated under established Constitutional Court practice — just as the complaint against the Regional Court was rejected — and therefore could not constitute an effective remedy for Convention purposes.
On the merits of the length complaint, the Court applied the standard Frydlender criteria — complexity of the case, conduct of the parties and authorities, and what was at stake — and found no fact or argument capable of justifying the overall duration. The Government’s submissions regarding procedural complexity (345 plaintiffs), adjournments attributable to the applicants’ representatives, and the alleged minor significance of the dispute for the applicants did not alter that conclusion. The proceedings, exceeding 21 years with no end in sight before the Land Office, plainly failed the reasonable-time requirement.
On Article 13, the Court found a violation based on the absence of an effective domestic remedy, following its reasoning in the Balogh and Others leading cases. The Constitutional Court’s practice of segmenting the proceedings and declining jurisdiction over the administrative phase — instead directing applicants to a separate administrative court action for inactivity — was incompatible with the Court’s approach of examining the overall length of proceedings as a whole. Slovakia was ordered to pay each applicant or household €8,500 in non-pecuniary damages and €250 in costs and expenses, within three months.
Key Takeaways
- Administrative restitution proceedings pending before the Komárno Land Office for over 21 years constituted a breach of the reasonable-time guarantee under Article 6 § 1, even accounting for case complexity and delays attributable to the applicants’ side.
- The exhaustion-of-domestic-remedies rule does not require applicants to lodge complaints against courts whose proceedings have already ended, where established national practice would in any event reject such complaints as belated.
- Slovakia’s Constitutional Court practice of bifurcating length-of-proceedings complaints — declining jurisdiction over the administrative phase and redirecting applicants to a separate inactivity action — was found incompatible with the Convention, confirming the approach set out in the two prior Balogh and Others judgments concerning the same domestic proceedings.
- A length-of-proceedings complaint is only “effective” for Convention purposes if it is capable of leading to an examination of the overall length of the proceedings in each individual case.
Why It Matters
This judgment is the third Strasbourg ruling to find human rights violations arising from the same set of Slovak restitution proceedings, underscoring a structural problem in how Slovakia handles protracted administrative cases. The Court’s refusal to allow the Government to carve out Supreme Court periods from the assessment — on the pragmatic ground that a complaint against that court would have been procedurally futile anyway — reinforces that the exhaustion doctrine cannot be weaponised to shield identifiable segments of unreasonably long proceedings from scrutiny.
For practitioners, the case confirms that where a domestic constitutional court systematically fragments length-of-proceedings complaints by declining jurisdiction over administrative phases and directing litigants to separate acceleration actions, that approach will not satisfy Article 13. States cannot discharge their obligation to provide an effective remedy by offering piecemeal procedures that prevent any single forum from assessing total delay.