Information Note on the Court’s case-law 31
June 2001
Giummarra and Others v. France (dec.) - 61166/00
Decision 12.6.2001 [Section III]
Article 35
Article 35-1
Exhaustion of domestic remedies
Effective domestic remedy
Effectiveness of domestic remedy based on Article L 781-1 of the Code of Judicial Organisation to complain about excessive length of proceedings already terminated: inadmissible
The applicants are respectively the wife and daughters of a gendarme who was killed in a shooting incident at a campsite in the Landes département in 1983, and a gendarme who was injured in the same incident. In August 1983 a judicial investigation was begun into offences including intentional homicide, aiding and abetting, and unlawfully possessing, carrying and conveying weapons. The deceased gendarme’s widow and the gendarme who had been injured applied on an unspecified date to join the investigation proceedings as civil parties. In August 1987 four people were indicted and committed to stand trial at the Landes Assize Court. Following numerous appeals, the case was remitted to the Paris Indictment Division in October 1989. In December 1993 the deceased gendarme’s widow and the gendarme who had been injured gave evidence to the investigating judge. In July 1994 and January 1996 the parties were informed that the investigation had been completed. In April 1998 the case file was lodged with the registry of the Landes Assize Court. In January 1999 the Court of Cassation referred the case to the Paris Assize Court in the interests of the proper administration of justice. In a judgment of 31 March 2000 the Paris Special Assize Court found three defendants guilty and sentenced them to four, fifteen and twenty years’ imprisonment respectively. Since no appeal was lodged against that judgment, the proceedings had ended.
Inadmissible under Article 6 § 1: As French legislation and case-law currently stood, anyone prejudiced by the excessive length of proceedings was entitled to bring an action for compensation under Article L 781-1 of the Code of Judicial Organisation. That remedy had been available since the Court of Appeal’s Gauthier v. the Treasury Solicitor judgment of 20 January 1999, and its existence confirmed on a number of subsequent occasions by appeal-court judgments which had not given rise to an appeal on points of law by the State; it had also been taken into account in the judgments of first-instance courts. The judgment of 20 January 1999 had become final on 20 March 1999 as no appeal on points of law had been lodged; furthermore, Mr Gauthier had not applied to the Court within a period of six months, as required by Article 35 § 1 of the Convention. Consequently, the Gauthier judgment could be regarded as having established a precedent as of 20 September 1999; the remedy available under Article L 781-1 had thus acquired a sufficient degree of legal certainty to represent a remedy that needed to be exhausted for the purposes of Article 35 § 1 if a complaint concerning the excessive length of proceedings was to be admissible. In this case, the applicants had not availed themselves of that remedy, even though on the date when they had lodged their application (24 August 2000) they could not have been unaware of the possibility of obtaining compensation for excessively lengthy proceedings by bringing an action under Article L 781-1 of the Code of Judicial Organisation: non-exhaustion.
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