Background
Five Ukrainian applicants lodged separate applications with the European Court of Human Rights complaining that civil proceedings before Ukrainian courts had lasted unreasonably long and that domestic law offered no effective remedy for such delays. The applications were introduced between April 2016 and October 2025 and were joined by the Court given their similar subject matter.
The proceedings at issue ranged from approximately four and a half years to over eight years across multiple levels of jurisdiction, with some cases still pending at the national level at the time of judgment. The applicants included individuals born between 1954 and 1969, and several were represented by lawyers based in Kyiv and Dnipro.
The Court assessed the cases against its established criteria for reasonable length of proceedings — the complexity of the case, the conduct of the parties and authorities, and what was at stake for the applicants — and found no facts or arguments justifying the overall duration of proceedings in any of the five cases.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Section Committee, sitting unanimously, held that Ukraine had violated Article 6 § 1 of the Convention, which guarantees the right to a fair trial within a reasonable time, and Article 13, which requires contracting states to provide an effective domestic remedy for Convention violations. The Court relied on its well-established line of authority, citing in particular Karnaushenko v. Ukraine (no. 23853/02, 30 November 2006) as the leading case identifying systemic failures of this kind in Ukraine.
The Court found the length of each applicant’s civil proceedings excessive and inconsistent with the “reasonable time” requirement of Article 6 § 1. It further found that the applicants had no effective domestic remedy available to them for those complaints, in breach of Article 13.
Under Article 41 (just satisfaction), the Court ordered Ukraine to pay non-pecuniary damages to each applicant within three months, with sums ranging from €500 to €3,000 depending on the number and duration of the proceedings involved, plus statutory interest at the ECB marginal lending rate plus three percentage points in the event of late payment.
Key Takeaways
- Ukraine was found to have breached both the reasonable-time guarantee (Article 6 § 1) and the effective-remedy requirement (Article 13) in all five joined cases, consistent with a well-documented pattern of systemic delay in Ukrainian civil courts.
- The Court awarded non-pecuniary damages ranging from €500 to €3,000 per applicant, with the highest award (€3,000) going to the applicant whose three sets of proceedings collectively spanned over eight years, two of which remained pending.
- The judgment follows the leading precedent of Karnaushenko v. Ukraine (2006), underscoring that this structural problem in Ukraine’s judicial system has persisted for nearly two decades without an adequate domestic remedy being introduced.
Why It Matters
This judgment is one in a long series of repetitive cases in which the Court has condemned Ukraine for systemic delays in civil litigation and the absence of any effective domestic mechanism allowing litigants to accelerate proceedings or obtain redress. The pattern signals an unresolved structural deficiency that Ukraine has not remedied through legislative or administrative reform, leaving the Strasbourg Court as the only practical avenue for affected litigants.
For practitioners advising clients caught in protracted Ukrainian civil proceedings, the judgment confirms that an Article 13-compliant domestic remedy remains absent, making a Strasbourg application a viable — and historically successful — route to at least partial compensation, even while national proceedings are still ongoing.