SECOND SECTION
DECISION
Application no. 59403/13
Elizabeth Mary Carol BEVERLEY
against Hungary
The European Court of Human Rights (Second Section), sitting on 11 February 2014 as a Committee composed of:
Nebojša Vučinić, President,
Paul Lemmens,
Robert Spano, judges
and Stanley Naismith, Section Registrar,
Having regard to the above application lodged on 3 September 2013,
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
THE FACTS
The applicant, Ms Elizabeth Mary Carol Beverley, is an Australian national, who was born in 1943 and lives in Arundel, Queensland, Australia.
The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicant, may be summarised as follows.
The applicant’s mother left Hungary and lived abroad first in Australia then in Canada, but owned several real properties in Hungary; among others a 919-sqm property in the 2nd district of Budapest. During a visit to Hungary, on 4 October 2004 she learned that the Budapest No. 1 Land Registry had struck her ownership from the record and registered a third person as the owner of the property on 17 July 2002. (As it turned out later, the decision was based on a forged resolution of a notary public created in fake inheritance proceedings.)
The property was subject to subsequent sale and purchase agreements on 17 July 2002, 16 May 2003 and in 2005, for a consideration of 30,000,000 Hungarian forints (HUF), approximately 100,000 euros, each time.
The intervening criminal proceedings about the apparent fraud were to no avail.
On 14 June and 29 December 2005, the legal representative of the applicant’s mother sent letters to the Land Registry requesting information about the basis for the transfer of the ownership and the possibilities of restoring the original situation. The representative also enquired of the office about its opinion concerning its responsibility for the transfer and damages.
As the Land Registry refused to provide compensation, on 24 August 2009 the applicant’s mother mandated her lawyer to bring an action in damages against the Land Registry.
Both the Budapest Regional Court and the Budapest Court of Appeal dismissed the claim with reference to the expiry of the statutory limitation period. According to the reasoning of the judgments, the claim lapsed on 17 July 2007, after five years to be counted from 17 July 2002. In the view of the courts, the lawyer’s letters of 14 June and 29 December 2005 were simple requests for information and were not sufficient to interrupt the running of the limitation period. The courts added that the lawyer of the applicant’s mother could have also challenged the registration of any illegitimate owner, which he had failed to do.
The judgment became final on 14 March 2013. As the applicant’s mother had died on 5 August 2011, it was the applicant, her sole heir, who pursued the claim before the second-instance court and submitted the present application to the Court.
No petition for review has been pursued before the Supreme Court.
COMPLAINTS
Relying on Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 6 of the Convention the applicant complained about the outcome of the domestic proceedings and the “strict” application of the rules of the statutory limitation period.
THE LAW
The Court notes at the outset that the applicant’s lawyer did not exhaust domestic remedies as he did not pursue a petition for review before the Supreme Court (see Béla Szabó v. Hungary, no. 37470/06, § 16, 9 December 2008). Moreover, as pointed out by the domestic courts, he also failed to challenge the allegedly fraudulent registration itself, by suing the illegitimate owners. In any event, the fact that the domestic courts dismissed the applicant’s claims by observing that they had been instituted after the expiry of the statutory limitation period does not indicate any unfairness in breach of Article 6 of the Convention or any arbitrary interference with the applicant’s property rights in breach of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1.
It follows that the application must be rejected, pursuant to Article 35 §§ 1, 3 (a) and 4 of the Convention.
For these reasons, the Court, unanimously,
Declares the application inadmissible.
Stanley Naismith Nebojša Vučinić
RegistrarPresident
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy