CASE OF COLLOREDO MANSFELDOVÁ v. THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Violation of Article 6 - Right to a fair trial (Article 6 - Civil proceedings;Article 6-1 - Fair hearing;Adversarial trial)
Kristina Pardalos;Pauliine Koskelo;Ksenija Turković
6. The applicant had a restitution claim concerning movable property located in Opočno Castle. The movable property was initially confiscated from a predecessor of the applicant during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1942 on the orders of the German Secret State Police, which considered him to be an enemy of the German Reich. After the end of the Second World War, the property was once again confiscated, in 1945, by the Czechoslovak State under the Beneš decrees. That expropriation was quashed on appeal by the National Council in Prague (zemský národní výbor) on 21 January 1947 after it had been established that the applicant’s predecessor was of Czechoslovak nationality and had been loyal to the Czechoslovak State. What happened to the property afterwards is disputed and was discussed in the domestic decisions. 7. Due to the large number of items claimed, the domestic courts consecutively issued three judgments, each concerning one of the three parts of the claim. They upheld the first part of the applicant’s claim but rejected the second and the third, which are the subject of the present applications. 8. In the course of the second proceedings, the courts based their decisions, inter alia, on a decision by the Ministry of Agriculture of 30 April 1947 by which Opočno Castle had been declared State cultural property (hereinafter “the 1947 decision”). The 1947 decision had not been raised with the parties in the course of the hearing and the parties had not received an opportunity to comment on it. 9. The situation of the applicant is structurally and contextually the same as that in Colloredo Mannsfeld v. the Czech Republic (nos. 15275/11 and 76058/12, 15 December 2016).