CASE OF MAXIAN AND MAXIANOVÁ v. SLOVAKIA
Violation of Article 6 - Right to a fair trial (Article 6 - Civil proceedings;Article 6-1 - Reasonable time)
Ján Šikuta;Luis López Guerra;Nona Tsotsoria
4. The applicants are spouses. They were born in 1949 and 1965 respectively and live in Vienna, Austria. 5. On 13 April 2005 the applicants brought an action seeking dissolution of joint ownership of a real estate before the Dunajská Streda District Court (file no. 9C 70/2005). 6. On 6 September 2006, at its fifth hearing, the District Court delivered a judgment. The defendant appealed. The applicants requested the District Court to give a supplementary judgment. On 9 November 2006 the case file was submitted to the Trnava Regional Court. 7. On 20 March 2007 the Regional Court returned the case file to the first-instance court as incomplete. On 11 September 2007 the District Court gave a supplementary judgment and on 11 January 2008 the case file was again submitted to the Regional Court. 8. In 2008 the Regional Court stayed the proceedings for two months pending the outcome of inheritance proceedings after the defendant had died. 9. On 31 March 2009 the Regional Court quashed the first-instance judgment and remitted the case to the District Court for a new determination. 10. On 20 August 2010 the applicants complained before the Constitutional Court about the length of the proceedings before the District Court. 11. On 4 October 2010 the District Court approved the friendly settlement of the case reached between the parties. This decision became final on 30 October 2010. 12. On 24 November 2010 the Constitutional Court declared the applicants’ complaint inadmissible as being manifestly ill-founded (case no. I. ÚS 455/2010). It held that there had been no significant delays in the proceedings before the District Court in breach of Article 6 § 1 of the Convention and its constitutional equivalent.