CASE OF MAGÁT v. SLOVAKIA
Violation of Article 6 - Right to a fair trial (Article 6 - Civil proceedings;Article 6-1 - Reasonable time)
Alena Poláčková;Helen Keller;Pere Pastor Vilanova
4. The applicant was born in 1957 and lives in Zákopčie. 5. On 28 February 2011 the applicant was sued by his son in proceedings on child maintenance before the Čadca District Court (file no. 10 C 38/2011). 6. During those proceedings he made an incomplete submission on 21 April 2011, which he supplemented the month after alleging that he had been waiting for a response from the Centre for Legal Aid in respect of his request for a legal aid lawyer. He also lodged two complaints with the president of the District Court about the excessive length of proceedings, namely on 9 February 2012 and 29 February 2012, which were unsuccessful. Having been dissatisfied with their outcome, he turned to the appellate court for review of his complaints to no avail. 7. The District Court, on the other hand, took the following steps. It asked several public authorities, such as for example Social Security Authority and the Job Centre, to provide it with information relevant to the case. Between May 2012 and April 2014, it was dealing with an appointment of a guardian to the applicant, who at the material time was undergoing an ambulatory psychiatric treatment. Such an appointment was eventually revoked in September 2014 on the grounds that the Centre for Legal Aid had appointed a lawyer for the applicant in June 2014. The District Court also joined the present case file to another set of proceedings for several months. In January 2014, the District Court judge responsible for hearing the applicant’s case changed. The District Court further scheduled several hearings, which were either adjourned or cancelled. 8. On 13 May 2015 the Constitutional Court rejected the applicant’s complaint about a violation of his right to a hearing within a reasonable time in the proceedings held before the District Court as manifestly ill-founded. It concluded that the District Court proceeded with the matter actively and properly, apart from a few minor exceptions, such as the joining of a case file to another set of proceedings, changing of the judge and a procedural error made during one of the hearings. In particular, the Constitutional Court took into account the fact that the applicant had complained of excessive delays with the president of the District Court and challenged them further on appeal on each occasion. 9. Subsequently, the District Court took several steps as follows. It asked for further information from inter alia the applicant’s employer. It also scheduled a hearing for 12 August 2015, which was adjourned to 31 August 2015. It then postponed the latter hearing to an unspecified date, since it had to deal with a procedural request from the plaintiff, which was also challenged on appeal. In the absence of any further information from the parties, it appears that the proceedings are still pending and no judgment on the merits has been delivered by the District Court.