Non-application of Article 6 (1) to redress procedures following a Strasbourg decision
JUDGMENT
Storck v. Germany 19.07.2018 (no. 486/14)
SUMMARY
The case concerns the domestic courts’ refusal to reopen civil proceedings against a private clinic following an ECHR judgment in Ms Storck’s favour.
The Court found that it did not have competence to examine the complaint as it did not concern a “new issue” which had not been dealt with by the previous judgment in Ms Storck’s case. Rather, the complaint concerned a matter relating to the execution of that previous judgment, which fell within the competence of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.
Regarding the other part of the application concerning the denial of legal aid, the Court decided to strike it out of its list of cases in view of the Government’s unilateral declaration to resolve the issue.
PROVISIONS
Article 6 § 1
Article 13
PRINCIPAL FACTS
The applicant, Waltraud Storck, is a German national who was born in 1958 and lives in Hünfelden-Kirberg.
By a judgment of 16 June 2005, the European Court of Human Rights found that Ms Storck’s placement and medical treatment in the H. Psychiatric Clinic from 1977 to 1979, against her will and without a court order, had breached the European Convention on Human Rights. The judgment, including an award of 75,000 euros in compensation in respect of non-pecuniary damage, became final on 16 September 2005. Regarding pecuniary damage, the Court held that it was aware that Ms Storck’s involuntary placement in the clinic entailed a loss of opportunities with regard to her professional career. However, on the basis of the material before it, it could not speculate how much money she would have earned at a later stage if she had not stayed in the clinic from 1977 to 1979.
In October 2005 Ms Storck applied to the Bremen Court of Appeal for legal aid to bring an action to reopen previous compensation proceedings she had brought against the clinic. However, in February 2006 the Court of Appeal dismissed her request as ill-founded for lack of sufficient prospects of success. Also, the intended action did not raise a difficult or unanswered legal question that made it necessary to grant her legal aid. Ms Storck’s objection to that decision was dismissed in April 2006.
During its meeting of 15-17 October 2007 the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe decided to close the examination of Ms Storck’s case, acknowledging that until 2006 there had been no explicit possibility under domestic law to ask for the reopening of civil proceedings following a violation found by the Court. In addition, it acknowledged that that Ms Storck might not benefit from new legislation which had changed that domestic law in December 2006. However, in the same resolution the Committee of Ministers stated that given “the constant practice of the Federal Constitutional Court, it is expected that the domestic court in its decision will fully implement the Convention as well as the European Court’s case-law in order to grant full redress to the applicant”.
In August 2013 the Federal Constitutional Court declined to consider a constitutional complaint by Ms Storck, giving detailed reasons for its decision. In March 2014 Ms Storck asked the Committee of Ministers to reopen the proceedings for the supervision of the enforcement of the Court’s 2005 judgment. The Committee of Ministers has not yet given a decision on that request.
By a letter of 1 March 2016 the Government proposed to make a unilateral declaration to resolve the issue of the Bremen Court of Appeal’s refusing to grant Ms Storck legal aid, acknowledging a breach of the applicant’s procedural rights.
THE DECISION OF THE COURT
The Court noted that the applicant had been awarded 75,000 euros in respect of non-pecuniary damage under its judgment of 2005. The present application was related to Ms Storck’s legal efforts to obtain further compensation at the domestic level.
Denial of legal aid
The Court reiterated that it may strike out an application in certain circumstances, in particular if it is no longer justified to continue examining it.
The Government submitted that the application as a whole was inadmissible, or in the alternative ill-founded, but that it had decided, having regard to Ms Storck’s medical history, to acknowledge in a unilateral declaration that there had been a violation of her procedural rights by the denial of legal aid.
The Court stated that Article 6 § 1 was in principle not applicable to proceedings concerning an application to reopen civil proceedings following one of its judgments. However, it did not see any need to address that question given the Government’s unilateral declaration, which included an offer of compensation of 17,000 euros for the refusal by the Bremen Court of Appeal to grant Ms Storck legal aid.
The Court therefore considered that it was no longer justified to continue the examination of this part of the application and struck it out of the list.
Article 46
The Court emphasised that after it found a violation of the Convention, it fell to the Committee of Ministers to evaluate the implementation of the measures taken by a respondent State. The Court had no competence to supervise the execution of its own judgments. However, that did not mean that measures taken by a State could not raise a new issue undecided by the previous judgment and, as such, form the subject of a new application that might be dealt with by the Court.
It thus had to be determined whether Ms Storck’s complaint concerned such a “new issue”.
The Court observed that the Bremen Court of Appeal, when rejecting Ms Storck’s request for legal aid to reopen the compensation proceedings, had found that domestic law did not allow for the reopening of civil proceedings following a judgment of the Court in an applicant’s favour.
Furthermore, the Court noted that the Committee of Ministers, in its resolution closing the examination of Ms Storck’s previous case, had acknowledged that until 2006 there had been no explicit possibility under domestic law to ask for the reopening of civil proceedings following a violation found by the Court. In addition, it was possible Ms Storck would not benefit from new legislation which had changed the domestic law in December 2006. Still, the Committee of Ministers’ resolution contained the expectation that “given the constant practice of the Federal Constitutional Court”, the domestic courts would “fully implement the Convention as well as the European Court’s case-law in order to grant full redress to the applicant”.
In the Court’s view it was, however, clear that the Committee’s closure of the case was not dependent on a specific outcome of the proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court.
Accordingly, that court’s decision of August 2013 was not relevant “new information” for the purposes of the Court’s case-law.
The Court observed that Ms Storck had asked the Committee to reopen supervision proceedings in her previous case and that the Committee had not yet decided on that request. Thus, the matters she had raised – notably that she had so far not been provided with sufficient redress for the violations found by the Court – had not been excluded from scrutiny by the Convention bodies.
In the light of those findings, the Court considered that the Committee of Ministers’ competence would be encroached upon if it were to examine this part of the application. As it contained no relevant new information, the complaint in that regard had to be declared inadmissible(echrcaselaw.com editing).
