Chassagnou and Others v. France [GC]

Information Note on the Court’s case-law 5

April 1999

Chassagnou and Others v. France [GC] - 25088/94, 28331/95 and 28443/95

Judgment 29.4.1999 [GC]

Article 11

Article 11-1

Freedom of association

Obligatory membership of hunting associations: violation

Article 1 of Protocol No. 1

Article 1 para. 1 of Protocol No. 1

Peaceful enjoyment of possessions

Obligation of land-owners to allow hunting on their property: violation

[Extract from press release]

Facts – The case concerned three applications originally lodged by ten French nationals, Mrs Marie-Jeanne Chassagnou, Mr René Petit, Mrs Simone Lasgrezas, Mr Léon Dumont, Mr Pierre Galland, Mr André Galland, Mr Edouard Petit (now deceased), Mr Michel Petit, Mr Michel Pinonand Mrs Josephine Montion, who were born in 1924, 1936, 1927, 1924, 1926, 1936, 1910, 1947, 1947 and 1940 respectively. Mrs Chassagnou, Mr René Petit and Mrs Lasgrezas live in the municipalities of Tourtoirac and Chourgnac-d’Ans, in the département of Dordogne, and are farmers. Mr Dumont, Mr Pierre Galland, Mr André Galland, Mr Michel Petit and Mr Pinon, who are also farmers, live in the municipalities of La Cellette and Genouillac, in the département of Creuse. Mrs Montion lives in Sallebœuf, in the département of Gironde, where she works as a secretary. All the applicants are owners of landholdings smaller than 20 hectares in area in the case of those who live in Dordogne and Gironde or 60 hectares in the case of those who live in Creuse. Pursuant to the Law of 10 July 1964, known as the “Loi Verdeille”, on the organisation of approved municipal or inter-municipality hunters’ associations (ACCAs and AICAs), all the applicants, who are opposed to hunting, had to become members of the ACCAs set up in their municipalities and to transfer hunting rights over their land to these associations so that all hunters living in the relevant municipality could hunt there. They could not evade the obligation to join the association and to transfer their hunting rights to it unless the area of their land exceeded a given threshold, which varied from one département to another (20 hectares in Dordogne and Gironde and 60 hectares in Creuse). This was not the case. The applicants applied to the French courts to have their land removed from the hunting grounds of the ACCAs of their municipalities, but their applications were dismissed in both the civil and the administrative courts. The final decisions were the Court of Cassation’s judgment of 16 March 1994 (in the case of Mrs Chassagnou, Mr R. Petit and Mrs Lasgrezas) and the Conseil d’Etat’s judgments of 10 March 1995 (Dumont and Others case) and 10 May 1995 (Montion case).

The applicants complained that the compulsory inclusion of their land in the hunting grounds of the ACCAs in question and the obligation to join an association of whose objects they disapproved had violated their right of property, their right to freedom of association and their right to freedom of thought and conscience, set forth in Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights and Articles 11 and 9 of the Convention. They also complained of discrimination contrary to Article 14 of the Convention.

Law

Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 as regards infringement of the applicants’ right of property: The Court noted that in the present case the applicants did not wish to hunt on their land and objected to the fact that others could come onto their land to hunt. However, although opposed to hunting on ethical grounds, they were obliged to tolerate the presence of armed men and gun dogs on their land every year. This restriction on the free exercise of the right of use undoubtedly constituted an interference with the applicants’ enjoyment of their rights as the owners of property. As far as the aim of that interference was concerned, the Court considered that it was undoubtedly in the general interest to avoid unregulated hunting and encourage the rational management of game stocks. After noting that none of the options mentioned by the Government (possibility for the applicants to enclose their land, or apply for it to be designated as game reserves or nature reserves) would in practice have been capable of absolving the applicants from the statutory obligation to transfer hunting rights over their land to ACCAs, the Court expressed the view that the various forms of statutory consideration mentioned by the Government could not be considered to represent fair compensation for loss of the right of use. It was clear that it was intended in the Loi Verdeille of 1964 for each landowner subject to compulsory transfer to be compensated for deprivation of the exclusive right to hunt on his land by the concomitant right to hunt throughout those parts of the municipality’s territory under ACCA control. However, that compensation was valuable only in so far as all the landowners concerned were hunters or accepted hunting. But the 1964 Act did not contemplate any measure of compensation for landowners opposed to hunting, who, by definition, did not wish to derive any advantage or profit from a right to hunt which they refused to exercise. The Court noted that compulsory transfer of the right to hunt, which in French law was one of the attributes of the right of property, derogated from the principle laid down by Article L. 222-1 of the Countryside Code, according to which no one may hunt on land belonging to another without the owner’s consent. The Court further observed that, following the adoption in 1964 of the Loi Verdeille, which had excluded from the outset the départements of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle, only 29 of the 93 départements concerned in metropolitan France had been made subject to the regime of compulsory creation of ACCAs, that ACCAs had been voluntarily set up in only 851 municipalities and that the Law applied only to small landholdings, to the exclusion of both large private estates and State land. In conclusion, notwithstanding the legitimate aims of the Loi Verdeille when it was adopted in 1964, the Court considered that the result of the compulsory-transfer system which it laid down had been to place the applicants in a situation which upset the fair balance to be struck between protection of the right of property and the requirements of the general interest. Compelling small landowners to transfer hunting rights over their land so that others could make use of them in a way which was totally incompatible with their beliefs imposed a disproportionate burden which was not justified under the second paragraph of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. There had therefore been a violation of that provision.

Conclusion: violation (twelve votes to five).

Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, taken in conjunction with Article 14 of the Convention: The Court observed that the respondent State sought to justify the difference in treatment between small and large landowners by pleading the need to pool small plots of land in order to promote the rational management of game stocks. The Court considered that in the present case the respondent Government had not put forward any convincing explanation how the general interest could be served by the obligation for small landowners only to transfer their hunting rights. Since the result of the difference in treatment between large and small landowners was to give only the former the right to use their land in accordance with their conscience, it constituted discrimination on the ground of property, within the meaning of Article 14 of the Convention. There had therefore been a violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 taken in conjunction with Article 14 of the Convention.

Conclusion: violation (fourteen votes to three).

Article 11 of the Convention taken separately: The term “association”, in the Court’s view,  possessed an autonomous meaning; the classification in national law had only relative value and constituted no more than a starting-point. It was true that the ACCAs owed their existence to the will of parliament, but the Court noted that they were nevertheless associations set up in accordance with the Law of 1 July 1901. Furthermore, it could not be maintained that under the Loi Verdeille ACCAs enjoyed prerogatives outside the orbit of the ordinary law, whether administrative, rule-making or disciplinary, or that they employed processes of a public authority. The Court accordingly considered that ACCAs were indeed “associations” for the purposes of Article 11. The Court considered that in the present case interference with the right to “negative” freedom of association, that is the right not to belong to an association against one’s will, had been prescribed by law and pursued a legitimate aim, namely protection of the rights and freedoms of others. In the present case the Government had pleaded the need to protect or encourage democratic participation in hunting. Even supposing that French law enshrined a “right” or “freedom” to hunt, the Court noted that such a right or freedom was not one of those set forth in the Convention, which did, however, expressly guarantee the freedom of association.

As regards the question whether the interference was proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued, the Court noted that the applicants were opposed to hunting on ethical grounds and that their convictions in this respect attained a certain level of cogency, cohesion and importance and were therefore worthy of respect in a democratic society. Accordingly, the Court considered that the obligation for persons opposed to hunting to join a hunters’ association might appear, prima facie, to be incompatible with Article 11. The Court noted that in the present case the applicants did not have any reasonable chance of being able to resign their membership. The fact that their properties were included in the hunting grounds of an ACCA and that they did not own a large enough area of land to lodge an objection was sufficient to make their membership compulsory. The Court went on to observe that all public property belonging to the State, a département or a municipality, public forests and land belonging to the French National Railway Company was expressly excluded from the ambit of the Loi Verdeille. In other words, the need to pool land for hunting applied only to a limited number of private landowners, whose opinions were not taken into consideration in any way whatsoever. In the light of the above considerations, the arguments put forward by the Government were not sufficient to establish that it was necessary to compel the applicants to become members of the ACCAs in their municipalities despite their personal convictions. With respect to the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others to ensure democratic participation in hunting, an obligation to join an ACCA which was imposed on landowners in only one municipality in four in France could not be regarded as proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. Nor could the Court see why it might be necessary to pool only small properties while large estates, both public and private, were protected from democratic participation in hunting. To compel a person by law to join an association such that it was fundamentally contrary to his own convictions to be a member of it, and to oblige him, on account of his membership of that association, to transfer his rights over the land he owned so that the association in question could attain objectives of which he disapproved, went beyond what was necessary to ensure that a fair balance was struck between conflicting interests and could not be considered proportionate to the aim pursued. There had therefore been a violation of Article 11.

Conclusion: violation (twelve votes to five).

Article 11, taken in conjunction with Article 14 of the Convention: The Court considered that examination of the complaint under Article 11 read in conjunction with Article 14 was in substance analogous to the examination conducted with regard to Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 and saw no reason to depart from its previous conclusion. It considered that the respondent Government had not put forward any objective and reasonable justification for this difference in treatment, which obliged small landowners to become members of ACCAs but enabled large landowners to evade compulsory membership, whether they exercised their exclusive right to hunt on their property or preferred, on account of their convictions, to use the land to establish a sanctuary or nature reserve. In conclusion, there had been a violation of Article 11 of the Convention taken in conjunction with Article 14.

Conclusion: violation (sixteen votes to one).

Article 9 of the Convention:  In the light of the conclusions it had reached with regard to violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 11 of the Convention, taken both separately and in conjunction with Article 14, the Court did not consider it necessary to conduct a separate examination of the case from the standpoint of Article 9 of the Convention.

Conclusion: not necessary to examine (sixteen votes to one).

Article 41 of the Convention: FRF 30,000 each in respect of non-pecuniary damage; claims in respect of pecuniary damage dismissed

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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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