CASE OF TRAPEZNIKOV AND OTHERS v. RUSSIA
Remainder inadmissible;No violation of Article 6 - Right to a fair trial (Article 6 - Civil proceedings;Article 6-1 - Fair hearing)
Branko Lubarda;Dmitry Dedov;Helen Keller;Helena Jäderblom;Johannes Silvis;Luis López Guerra;Pere Pastor Vilanova
5. The applicants were claimants in civil proceedings. 6. In the applications Trapeznikov v. Russia and Bychkov and Others v. Russia, the applicants were former participants of the Chernobyl clean-up operation who sued the relevant authorities for an inflation adjustment to their social benefits. 7. In the application Markova v. Russia, the applicant sought the eviction of her late son’s wife and her granddaughter from the flat she was living in, alleging that she was the sole owner because her son had renounced his share in the flat in her favour. 8. In the application Ryabchikov v. Russia, the applicant inherited a house in accordance with a will drawn up by his late mother. Later he discovered that she had two plots of land which she transferred back in 1994 to an agricultural company to which she was a member. The applicant sought to recover the property of these two plots of land alleging that the transfer had not been duly formalised and that consequently the land formed part of his inheritance. 9. In all of the applications, the first-instance courts found for the applicants, the judgments were upheld on appeal and they became enforceable. Subsequently, at the defendants’ requests, the presidia of the relevant regional courts quashed the judgments by way of supervisory review. In the applications Trapeznikov and Bychkov and Others, the presidia found that the lower courts failed to take into account the specific method of calculation of indexation established by the Government for this particular category of social benefits. In the applications Markova and Ryabchikov, they concluded that the findings of the lower courts favorable to the applicants were based on the retrospective application of the law (see Appendix).