When Non-Payment Becomes Expropriation

A claim established by a final and enforceable judgment is treated as a possession within the meaning of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. It is sufficiently established to be enforceable, which is the test — not whether it has been paid, but whether it is legally owed and due.

Once that step is accepted, a State that fails to pay is not merely running a defective procedure. It is interfering with property, and it has to justify the interference.

• Article 6 § 1 addresses the delay

  The complaint is that a final judicial decision was left inoperative. The natural redress is enforcement, plus compensation for the frustration of waiting.

• Protocol No. 1 addresses the value

  The complaint is that a possession was rendered worthless in practice. That frames the loss in monetary terms and supports a claim for the sum itself, with erosion by inflation as part of the damage.

• They fail differently

  If the property claim runs into difficulty over whether the debt was sufficiently established, the fair-trial claim is unaffected. Running one only is a single point of failure.

Immobiliare Saffi v. Italy [GC], application no. 22774/93, judgment of 28 July 1999, is the case usually reached for. A company holding an enforceable order could not obtain police assistance to execute it for years, because of successive statutory suspensions. The Court found both a fair-trial violation and an unjustified interference with property: the State had, in effect, deprived the applicant of the substance of its right without shouldering the corresponding burden.

The structure of that reasoning maps directly onto public-sector non-payment. A creditor with a final judgment against a municipality is in the same position as a landlord with an unexecutable order — the entitlement exists on paper and is inert in fact.

Because they answer different questions, and because the just-satisfaction stage rewards it. A violation established only under Article 6 invites an award calibrated to the distress of waiting. A violation that also engages Protocol No. 1 puts the outstanding sum, and its loss of value over the years, squarely in front of the Court as the thing to be repaired.