Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 100
August-September 2007
Million v. France - 6051/06
Decision 30.8.2007 [Section III]
Article 6
Civil proceedings
Article 6-1
Fair hearing
Lack of a time-limit for challenging administrative proceedings in the courts: inadmissible
In 1989 the bureau of the regional council authorised the signing of a lease on a service flat for the applicant, and then granted permission for the applicant to use it free of charge on grounds of absolute necessity for his work. The two decisions were published in the region’s compendium of administrative decisions. In 1998 a member of the regional council who had apparently learned of the content of the decisions in October 1995 lodged two applications seeking to have them set aside. The administrative court overturned the decisions. The applicant, who had not been a party to the proceedings, lodged two third-party applications with the administrative court to have the above judgments declared null and void. The third-party applications were declared admissible but were rejected on the merits. The administrative court held that the request to have the decisions set aside had been admissible, as the decisions had not been sufficiently publicised and the member of the regional council concerned had not been in office at the time they were taken, with the result that the two-month time‑limit for lodging an application could not start to run. The admissibility of the application to set the decisions aside was upheld by the Administrative Court of Appeal and the Conseil d’Etat.
Inadmissible under Article 6 § 1 – The Court had previously ruled that one of the essential elements of the rule of law was the principle of legal certainty, which required, above all, that where the courts had finally determined an issue, their ruling should not be called into question. In the present case, however, the applicant had not complained that he had been deprived of his right of access to a court, but of the fact that the legislation in force at the material time did not impose any limit on the period of time during which an administrative act could be challenged before the courts. Neither Article 6 nor any other provision of the Convention required States to introduce limitation periods or to fix the point at which they started to run: incompatible ratione materiae.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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