Belgium has violated the right to a fair trial by allowing a civil case to drag on for seven years, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights said in a press release issued on Tuesday.
In 2015, the claimant brought a civil action in front of the French-speaking court of first instance in Brussels, seeking to have the sale of an apartment declared null and void on the grounds of lack of consent, reports the press release. Seven years later, the procedure is still ongoing.
On Tuesday, the European court ruled that Belgium violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ right to a fair trial, as the government “failed to provide an explanation for these delays”.
“No matter how complex a case may be, the Court cannot consider long periods of unexplained procedural stagnation to be ‘reasonable’”, the court said.
Belgium is no stranger to excessively lengthy proceedings, and the phenomenon is even quite systemic, the court said, referring to the many convictions against Belgium in this area, a trend that can be explained mainly by the lack of court staff and resources.
In 2018, the Belgian Judicial Council had warned of a shortage of French-speaking magistrates:
Of the 633 judicial vacancies published in 2017, almost half – 292 – were not filled since 2011.
These figures reflect the significant and steady decline in the number of candidates for the competitive entrance examination: from almost 600 candidates in 2011 to 258 in 2017.
In its 2022 Rule of Law annual report, the European Commission also pointed out Belgium’s lack of personnel and resources for the justice system and advised Belgium to “continue measures to provide adequate human and financial resources for the justice system as a whole”.
As regards the case for which the judgment was delivered on Wednesday, the Court ordered the Belgian State to pay the plaintiff €5,000 in moral damages.
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Source: euractiv.com
