Background
Volodymyr Kasandyak, a Ukrainian national born in 1967, suffered unlawful delays in the processing of his pension documents by a department of Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior. A 2011 judgment of the Circuit Administrative Court of Kyiv, upheld on appeal and in cassation, established the department’s liability for those delays.
Seeking compensation for non-pecuniary damage flowing from the unlawful inaction, Kasandyak brought two successive civil actions. The first, lodged in January 2013 directly against the department, was dismissed by the Kyiv Court of Appeal in April 2013 on the ground that such claims under Article 1173 of the Civil Code had to be brought against the State, with the State Treasury named as a defendant. Following those instructions, Kasandyak filed a second claim in July 2013 naming the State Treasury as defendant. An expert examination ordered by the first-instance court confirmed he had suffered psychological harm caused by the department’s unlawful inaction.
The second claim was ultimately dismissed by the Higher Specialised Civil and Criminal Court in March 2016. That court held that Kasandyak had not proven the State Treasury itself caused him harm, and that he was additionally required to name the Ministry of the Interior — the superior body of the responsible department — as a co-defendant alongside the State Treasury. The department had participated in the second proceedings only as a third party, not as a defendant.
The Court’s Holding
The European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that there had been a violation of Article 6 § 1 of the Convention. The dismissal of Kasandyak’s second compensation claim was excessively formalistic and, in effect, denied him practical and effective access to a court. The Court noted that the applicant had followed the appellate court’s own instructions in structuring his second claim, and that the wording of the relevant Plenary Supreme Court Resolution was ambiguous as to whether the responsible department had to be joined as a co-defendant rather than merely a third party.
The Court emphasised that where a public entity is responsible for the harm, the State bears a heightened positive obligation to facilitate identification of the correct defendant, citing Dzirnis v. Latvia. The responsible department — whose fault had already been established by a final domestic judgment — participated fully in the second proceedings as a third party and was able to make submissions on all aspects of the case, including the extent of the damage. In those circumstances, the rigid insistence on a formal co-defendant designation served no legitimate purpose proportionate to the restriction on the applicant’s right of access.
The Court joined to the merits and dismissed the Government’s admissibility objection that Kasandyak had failed to exhaust domestic remedies by not pursuing a cassation appeal in the first set of proceedings. Having regard to the excessively formalistic outcome of the second proceedings, he could not reasonably be faulted for that omission. Ukraine was ordered to pay Kasandyak EUR 1,500 in respect of non-pecuniary damage arising from the Convention violation itself.
Key Takeaways
- Dismissing a compensation claim solely because the claimant failed to name a public body as a co-defendant — rather than a third party — will violate Article 6 § 1 where the body participated fully in the proceedings and its liability had already been established by a final judgment.
- When ambiguous domestic rules govern how to structure a claim against the State, courts must give the claimant reasonable guidance; penalising a litigant who followed prior judicial instructions is excessively formalistic and breaches the right of access to a court.
- The State’s positive obligation to facilitate access to justice is heightened in cases involving public-authority liability, where the proper procedural route for obtaining compensation may be unclear to an ordinary litigant.
- Article 1173 of the Ukrainian Civil Code has been found by the Court to be couched in very general terms, with practical application dependent on further clarification — reinforcing that domestic courts must not impose unduly strict procedural requirements when applying it.
Why It Matters
This judgment adds to a line of Strasbourg authority — including Kostadin Mihaylov v. Bulgaria, Georgel and Georgeta Stoicescu v. Romania, and Drozdyk and Mikula v. Ukraine — holding that rigid procedural gatekeeping which prevents a meritorious claimant from having a compensation claim examined on the merits is incompatible with Article 6 § 1. For Ukrainian practitioners and courts, it signals that directing a claimant to restart litigation on formalistic defendant-naming grounds, after that claimant has followed prior court guidance, will not withstand Strasbourg scrutiny.
More broadly, the decision underscores that the right of access to a court is not merely theoretical: states must ensure the procedural framework for suing public authorities is sufficiently clear and that courts do not apply ambiguous rules in ways that extinguish legitimate compensation claims.