Background
Five applicants from two households challenged Greece’s failure to enforce a final domestic judgment. In May 2023, the Pyrgos Administrative Court of First Instance ruled that authorities must lift urban planning obligations imposed on the applicants’ properties by ministerial decisions dating to 1988 and 1992. Over two years and five months elapsed without enforcement. The applicants exhausted the domestic remedy available under Law No. 3068/2002, which Greece argued constituted an effective remedy for challenging the delay.
The case involved the core tension between formal judgment and practical enforcement: even a court victory provides no real relief if the state delays or refuses to implement the order. The applicants complained that Greece violated their right to a fair trial and their right to an effective remedy for addressing non-enforcement.
The Court’s Holding
The Court unanimously found that Greece violated Article 6 § 1 (right to fair trial) and Article 13 (right to effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights. The judgment execution is an integral part of the right to a hearing, and the Greek authorities failed to deploy all necessary efforts to enforce the domestic judgment fully and in due time.
Critically, the Court rejected Greece’s defense that the domestic remedy under Law No. 3068/2002 was effective. The remedy proved inadequate because it could not accelerate execution when authorities refused or delayed compliance—it does not actually address the enforcement failure itself. This reasoning, consistent with the Court’s precedents in Kanellopoulos v. Greece and Bousiou v. Greece, establishes that nominal remedies fail if they cannot cure the wrong complained of.
The Court awarded €2,000 per household for non-pecuniary damage and €250 per application for costs and expenses, and emphasized that Greece retains an outstanding obligation to enforce judgment A286/2023.
Key Takeaways
- Judgment execution is part of the fair trial guarantee—a court order that goes unenforced denies the applicant the substance of their right to court access.
- A domestic remedy is only “effective” if it can actually address the wrong; a remedy that merely processes complaints without accelerating enforcement fails the test.
- Delays exceeding two years in enforcing an administrative judgment breach Article 6 § 1 absent compelling justification, even when the underlying procedure was complex.
- Greece remains bound by law to enforce the underlying domestic judgment, and the ECHR decision itself does not substitute for that enforcement.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that European member states cannot treat final judgments as advisory. The right to a fair trial is hollow if the state can indefinitely ignore court orders. By holding that domestic “remedies” must genuinely accelerate compliance—not merely acknowledge complaints—the Court closes a gap in protection that states had exploited by offering procedures that change nothing about the underlying non-enforcement.
For practitioners across Europe, the judgment clarifies that enforcement delays of over two years trigger liability absent concrete demonstration of complexity or effort, and that merely offering applicants a channel to complain about delay (without power to compel compliance) does not satisfy the effective remedy requirement. States must deploy active administrative resources to execute judgments within reasonable periods.