Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 152
May 2012
Flores Cardoso v. Portugal - 2489/09
Judgment 29.5.2012 [Section II]
Article 1 of Protocol No. 1
Article 1 para. 1 of Protocol No. 1
Possessions
Reimbursement of sum deposited with Portuguese Consulate on the independence of Mozambique without any allowance in respect of inflation or currency depreciation: no violation
Facts – The case concerned repayment by the State of a sum of money which the applicants had deposited with the Portuguese consulate in Mozambique when leaving the former Portuguese colony following the outbreak of the civil war in 1976. Some 3,000 people were apparently in a similar situation. The applicants complained that no account had been taken of the depreciation of the currency or of inflation when the money had been repaid to them. Their claims for compensation were dismissed.
Law – Article 1 of Protocol No.1: The sum deposited by the applicants with the consulate was a “possession” within the meaning of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. According to the Court’s well-established case-law, it could not be inferred from that Article that there was a general obligation on States to maintain, by means of systematic indexation, the purchasing power of sums deposited with banks or other financial institutions. The same reasoning applied, a fortiori, to a sum deposited with a non-financial institution, as in the present case. Remittance of the sum at issue to the consulate could not be deemed to constitute an interest-bearing deposit, and moreover the parties had not stipulated any compensatory interest on the sum in question. Only a specific agreement between the applicants and the depositary on adjustment of the sum upon repayment, in line with inflation and depreciation of the currency, could preclude application of the nominalism principle provided for by domestic law. Under domestic law, the applicants were entitled only to receive the nominal value of the sum in question. A “legitimate expectation” could only amount to a “possession” if there was a sufficient basis in domestic law. However, neither domestic law nor the decisions of the domestic courts had ever been able to establish any financial interest for the applicants that could be considered as such. While the applicants were entitled to repayment of the nominal amount of the sum in question, an obligation with which the Government had complied, they were not entitled to claim any adjustment of that sum. The applicants’ entitlement to a sum so adjusted could not therefore be deemed to amount to a “possession”.
Conclusion: no violation (five votes to two).
The Court also held, unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 6 § 1.
Article 41: EUR 2,600 in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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