When Enforcement Became Part of the Trial

Two British nationals wanted to open an English-language school on Rhodes. The Greek administration refused the licence. They challenged the refusal, and the Supreme Administrative Court annulled it. The judgment was final and binding, and the administration did nothing. Not appealed, not resisted in court — simply not applied.

On the reasoning available before that point, this was not obviously a fair-trial problem. The applicants had been heard by an independent court within a reasonable time and had won. Article 6 § 1, read narrowly, had been satisfied in full. The only thing missing was the result.

The Court refused the narrow reading. It held that the right of access to a court would be illusory if a domestic legal system allowed a final, binding judicial decision to remain inoperative to the detriment of one party. Execution of a judgment, it concluded, must be regarded as an integral part of "the trial" for the purposes of Article 6.

That single move converted a procedural guarantee into an outcome guarantee. A State can no longer separate the judgment it lost from the payment it owes and treat only the first as a matter of rights. The case is Hornsby v. Greece, application no. 18357/91, judgment of 19 March 1997.

• The violation is the delay itself

  You do not have to prove bad faith, discrimination or a defective procedure. An unenforced final judgment against a public body is, on its own, the thing the Court examines.

• Lack of funds is not a defence

  The Court has consistently declined to accept budgetary difficulty as justification for a State failing to honour a judgment debt. That argument works domestically far more often than it works in Strasbourg.

• The obligation runs to the whole State

  A municipality, a public hospital, a state-owned company under effective public control — the Convention does not let a State subdivide itself into solvent and insolvent parts to escape its own courts.

It does not turn the Court into a debt-collection forum. Where the debtor is a private party, the State is answerable only for the enforcement machinery it provides, not for the debt — a materially harder case that turns on whether the authorities took the reasonable steps available to them.

Nor does it remove any admissibility requirement. Exhaustion of domestic remedies and the time limit apply exactly as before. The holding tells you what the violation is; it does not tell you that you are in time to allege it.

When we assess a file, this is the first question: is there a final domestic decision, and is the debtor the State or an emanation of it? If both are yes, the case has a spine. Everything after that — quantum, the property claim under Protocol No. 1, the time limit — is built on it.