Last Updated on October 3, 2020 by LawEuro
Information Note on the Court’s case-law 214
January 2018
Ciocodeică v. Romania – 27413/09
Judgment 16.1.2018 [Section IV]
Article 13
Effective remedy
State’s alleged failure to enforce final judgment against private debtor: no violation
Facts – The applicant complained under Articles 6 and 13 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 that the State had failed to effectively assist her in enforcing a final judgment in her favour and that she did not have an effective remedy in that regard.
Law – Article 13: The Court had already examined complaints, similar to the applicant’s, brought by applicants alleging that the Romanian State had failed to effectively assist them in obtaining enforcement of the final domestic judgments given in their favour against private parties. In a narrow majority of such cases the Court had found a violation of Article 6, holding that the State authorities (mainly the bailiff service) had failed to act diligently and in due time in order to assist the applicants in having their judgments enforced. However, in other cases dealing with enforcement proceedings in which the debtor was a private party, the Court had found either that the State’s obligations prescribed by Article 6 § 1 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 had been complied with, or that the applicants themselves had not manifested sufficient diligence in pursuing their complaints.
The respondent State had implemented a series of significant legislative amendments, mainly concerning the (i) enforcement procedure regulated by the new Code of Civil Procedure, which had entered into force on 15 February 2013, (ii) the public legal-aid system, amended in 2008, and (iii) the legal framework regulating bailiffs’ activities, including the implementation in 2014 of the bailiffs’ indemnity fund. All these amendments aimed to improve the enforcement mechanism in general. The domestic case-law provided by the Government, as well as the legal opinions expressed by a consistent number of domestic courts across the country concerning the sufficiency and efficiency of the means made available to creditors of private parties for enforcing outstanding judgments were reliable evidence as to the improvement of the enforcement mechanism overall.
The new legislative provisions expressly prescribed that the State or other relevant authorities had to support bailiffs in providing necessary information or assistance in the enforcement procedure, when required. If they failed to do so, they were liable to a fine or to pay compensation for the damage caused by the delayed enforcement. At the same time, enforcement proceedings were more easily accessible to creditors following the improvements brought to the public legal-aid system. Furthermore, enforcement proceedings were to be conducted within stricter and shorter time-limits, while the fines that might be imposed by the courts on non-compliant authorities had increased in amount. The law also provided safeguards against abuse or bad faith on the part of debtors or bailiffs, who were discouraged from circumventing the existing procedures by excessive use of suspension of the enforcement proceedings or of unfounded objections to enforcement.
Accordingly, the Government could be deemed to have fulfilled their duty to review the situation and had provided sufficient evidence in its domestic case-law to show that effective remedies had been introduced and/or had become more easily available to creditors in their attempts to have their judgments enforced.
In the instant case, the Court found on the facts that the applicant had failed to make proper use of the more appropriate remedies relevant to her case and through her inaction had allowed the enforcement proceedings to become time barred.
Conclusion: no violation (unanimously).
The Court also held, unanimously, that there had been no violation of Article 6 of the Convention or of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, considering that the applicant had not put forward any fact or argument capable of persuading it to conclude that the state authorities had failed to do what could reasonably have been expected of them to enforce the impugned court decision.
(See also Foundation Hostel for Students of the Reformed Church and Stanomirescu v. Romania, 2699/03 and 43597/07, 7 January 2014, Information Note 170)
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