Jan Šinágl angažovaný občan, nezávislý publicista

European human rights court finds the Czech state failed to give a high profile Austrian property claimant a fair trial.

‘The Court found that the way that the criminal proceedings had been brought and conducted had been manifestly abusive.’

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has harshly criticized the Czech state for the pressure brought to bear during the high profile court proceedings of Austrian nobleman František Oldřich Kinský to reclaim Czech property taken from his family in the wake of WWII.

The Strasbourg, France-based court said in a decision released on Thursday that pressure brought, including the launch of a police investigation into Kinský’s lawyer and tapping of his phone calls, meant that the claimant could not be regarded as having had a fair trial. “The Court found that the way that the criminal proceedings had been brought and conducted had been manifestly abusive.”

Under the civil proceedings for property claims brought Kinský there was no obligation under Czech law to provide the court with all the information he and his lawyer possessed, the ECHR decision said. Police possession of such information, through questionable means, helped give the Czech state an insight into his next legal steps, it added.

The court decision added that comments from Czech politicians about Kinský’s court proceedings and close monitoring by the Ministry of Justice of the cases in question after 2004, while stopping short of direct intervention, clearly gave judges the impression that their actions were being closely monitored. It added that all Kinský’s claims after 2003 were unsuccessful, whereas he had met with partial success previously.

The court ordered the Czech state to pay €10,000 in damages and €3,830 in costs to Kinský, who died in April 2009 in Argentina.

Kinský’s more than 100 civil claims for return of property, estimated to be worth a total €2 billion,  taken under the post-war Czechoslovak Beneš Decrees were legal dynamite in the Czech Republic. After being refused to go through the normal restitution procedures, Kinský turned to the civil courts. Success for him there could have opened the floodgates to claims worth hundreds of billions of crowns against the Czech state. Verbal attacks on Kinský included remarks from a serving minister of culture that the claimant’s family had clearly “demonstrably” been Nazis.

The decision made public on Thursday is not final. An appeal against it can be launched within the following three months which could result in the case being examined by a so-called Grand Chamber composed of five judges. These will be able to give a final verdict.

The Beneš Decrees expelled ethnic Germans who had been living in the Sudetenland border regions of former Czechoslovakia and the property of those judged to have cooperated with the Nazi regime of the wartime Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia which compromised the Czech remnants of Czechoslovakia under Nazi occupation.

http://www.ceskapozice.cz/en/news/society/czech-state-slammed-human-rights-court-over-property-claimant