CASE OF RASTORGUYEV AND OTHERS v. RUSSIA
Violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 - Protection of property (Article 1 para. 1 of Protocol No. 1 - Deprivation of property)
Dmitry Dedov;Luis López Guerra
4. On 18 January 2007 the Moscow City authorities, the Ministry of the Defence of the Russian Federation and a private construction company signed an investment contract for the construction of a number of residential buildings in Moscow. Pursuant to the contract, a title to 3,823 flats was to be transferred to the Ministry of the Defence. The rest of the flats were to remain the city’s property. 5. In 2008 the city authorities commissioned, as part of the said investment contract, several residential buildings. It appears that a number of flats in those buildings were transferred to the Ministry of the Defence. 6. In 2009 the city authorities had their title to a number of flats, including those in residential buildings nos. 8 and 26-1 at Ulitsa Marshala Savitskogo, Moscow, registered by the state authorities. 7. In 2010 the Ministry of the Defence assigned five of those flats to private individuals and entered into social housing agreements with them. Subsequently those people successfully applied to the Zyuzinskiy District Court of Moscow seeking recognition of their title to the flats by way of privatisation. Once the court’s judgments became final, they had their ownership in respect of the flats registered in the state register and then sold the flats to other persons, including the applicants. The relevant transactions and transfer of the title to the property were duly registered by the authorities. The applicants moved into the flats and resided there. 8. According to the Government, in 2012 and 2013 the police opened criminal investigation in respect of the fraudulent transactions with the flats. The Government did not inform of its outcome. 9. On an unspecified date city authorities asked the District Court to reopen the cases concerning the flats privatised by the tenants who sold them to the applicants in 2011. The authorities claimed that the flats owned by the applicants were the city’s property. The District Court granted the request, quashed the earlier judgments allowing the privatisation of the flats and re-examined the cases. The court established, inter alia, that the Ministry of the Defence had never owned the flats and, accordingly, had not had a right to assign them to private individuals. It granted the city’s claims in full invalidating the decisions of the Ministry of the Defence in respect of the flats and ordering the applicants’ eviction. The court also found that the applicants had acquired the flats in good faith. However, it ruled that the cases fell under one of the two exceptions to the protection of a bona fide purchaser’s title, which required that precedence be given to the City of Moscow given that the flats had left the City’s possession against the latter’s will. 10. The applicants’ appeals were to no avail. The Moscow City Court and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation rejected them as unsubstantiated. 11. According to the Government, the judgments ordering the applicants’ eviction were not enforced. The applicants continue to reside in the flats. 12. The details pertaining to each case are summed up in Appendix II below.