KRIZMANIĆ v. CROATIA
Inadmissible
Dmitry Dedov;Elisabeth Steiner;Isabelle Berro-Lefèvre;Julia Laffranque;Khanlar Hajiyev;Mirjana Lazarova Trajkovska;Ksenija Turković
1. The applicant, Mr Mladen Krizmanić, is a Croatian national, who was born in 1963 and lives in Tinjan. He was represented before the Court by Mr B. Zustović, a lawyer practising in Pazin. 2. The Croatian Government (“the Government”) were represented by their Agent, Ms Š. Stažnik. 3. The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows. 4. The applicant was employed with the publicly owned Labour Organisation for Road Maintenance and Construction in Pula (Radna organizacija za održavanje cesta Pula; hereinafter “Pula Road Maintenance”). At a meeting of the Central Housing Commission of Pula Road Maintenance held on 7 February 1989 it was decided that one of the two flats which constituted the Tinjan “road-workers’ house” (cestarska kuća u Tinjanu) would be given to the applicant, “since the flat was empty and Mladen Krizmanić did not have a flat”. By an agreement of the same day, the applicant’s employer granted him a specially protected tenancy (stanarsko pravo) for an indefinite duration for the flat at issue, which was publicly owned, and the applicant moved into the flat with his family. The relevant part of that agreement reads: Drawn up between the Labour Organisation for Road Maintenance and Construction in Pula ... represented by its director B.Č. and Mladen Krizmanić from the Tinjan roadworkers’ house as the holder of a specially protected tenancy (hereinafter “the tenant”). The Labour Organisation for Road Maintenance and Construction in Pula ... on the basis of a decision of the Central Housing Commission ... of 7 February 1989 allocates to Mladen Krizmanić from Tinjan a flat for official purposes in ... the Tinjan road-workers’ house on the ground floor. The flat consists of three rooms, a kitchen and a toilet and measures ninety-three square metres. On the basis of the above-mentioned decision of the Central Housing Commission, this agreement fixes the rent at 271dinars ... ... This agreement is concluded for an indefinite period ...” 5. On 3 June 1991 Parliament enacted the Protected Tenancies (Sale to Occupier) Act (Zakon o prodaji stanova na kojima postoji stanarsko pravo), which regulated the sale of publicly owned flats previously let under specially protected tenancies. 6. Pula Road Maintenance was privatised and part of it became the Pula Road Company while the other part became “Croatian Roads” (Hrvatske ceste). 7. On an unspecified date the applicant asked Croatian Roads, one of the successors of his former employer and the owner of the flat occupied by the applicant, to conclude a contract for the sale of the flat between the owner as the seller and himself as the buyer. On 31 January 1994 the owner declined his request on the grounds that the applicant had not acquired a specially protected tenancy on the flat at issue because it had been designated as a “flat for official purposes”. 8. On 27 May 1994 the applicant brought a civil action in the Pazin Municipal Court (Općinski sud u Pazinu) seeking a judgment in lieu of the contract of sale. He argued that there was another flat in the same house, occupied by the M. family, and that neither flat had been allocated to employees performing road-maintenance functions. Moreover, those flats had never served any “official purpose”; they were simply residential accommodation. 9. On 20 March 1995 the Municipal Court accepted the applicant’s claim and established that he had the right to a specially protected tenancy on the flat at issue. 10. However, that judgment was quashed on 11 September 1995 by the Pula County Court (Županijski sud u Puli) and the case was remitted to the Municipal Court. 11. On August 1996 the Pazin Municipal Court established that the applicant had not acquired a specially protected tenancy on the flat in question. The court found that, even though some of the flats in so-called “road-workers’ houses” had indeed been sold under the Protected Tenancies (Sale to Occupier) Act, the majority had not been sold. The court also established that the flat at issue had not been allocated to the applicant for any “official purpose”. However, it found that the flat had been given to him for temporary occupation only, until he could be allocated another flat. 12. That judgment was upheld on 28 April 1997 by the Pula County Court, which also established that the flat at issue had been designated for “official purposes”. 13. On 23 December 1997 the applicant lodged an appeal on points of law (revizija), to be decided by the Supreme Court. He lodged it with the Pazin Municipal Court, as required under the Civil Procedure Act. It appears that it was not forwarded to the Supreme Court. 14. On 23 February 2005 the applicant lodged a complaint about the length of the civil proceedings with the Constitutional Court. On 17 February 2006 the Constitutional Court declared the complaint inadmissible on the grounds that the proceedings had ended on 28 April 1997. 15. However, on 8 May 2007 the Pazin Municipal Court instituted proceedings with a view to reinstating the applicant’s submission of 23 December 1997. The applicant’s appeal on points of law was subsequently forwarded to the Supreme Court, which dismissed it on 4 December 2007, fully endorsing the reasoning of the lower courts. 16. A subsequent constitutional complaint lodged by the applicant about the merits of the case was dismissed on 9 September 2010. It was served on the applicant’s lawyer on 30 September 2010. 17. The Civil Procedure Act (Zakon o parničnom postupku, Official Gazette nos. 53/1991 and 91/1992), as in force at the material time, provided that in cases where a first-instance judgment had been upheld by that of the second-instance, it became res judicata when the second-instance court delivered its judgment. An appeal on points of law was regarded as an extraordinary remedy, that is, a remedy which could be lodged only against a res judicata judgment, and which did not, unless successful, affect the validity of that judgment.