Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 120
June 2009
OOO Link Oil SPB v. Russia (dec.) - 42600/05
Decision 25.6.2009 [Section I]
Article 6
Civil proceedings
Article 6-1
Fair hearing
Quashing of binding and enforceable decisions by Supreme Commercial Court under new supervisory-review procedure: inadmissible
A legislative reform introduced on 1 January 2003 by Chapter 36 of the new Code of Commercial Procedure made a number of changes to the supervisory-review procedure in commercial cases. In particular, it abolished the discretionary power of the President and Deputy President of the Supreme Commercial Court to initiate supervisory-review proceedings, stipulated that only parties to the proceedings or affected persons could apply for supervisory review, introduced short time-limits and expressly limited the grounds for supervisory review.
The applicant company obtained a money judgment against another company which became binding and enforceable in 2005 after being upheld by a federal commercial court in cassation proceedings. Within the three-month statutory time-limit, the judgment debtor lodged an application for supervisory-review with the Supreme Commercial Court, which ordered a stay of execution pending its review. A Presidium of the Supreme Commercial Court subsequently examined the case in adversarial proceedings and quashed the judgment in the applicant company’s favour on one of the three statutory grounds. The case was remitted to a commercial court, which dismissed the applicant company’s claims in a decision that was upheld on appeal.
Inadmissible: The new supervisory-review procedure applicable in the Supreme Commercial Court was structurally different from the procedure exercised by courts of general jurisdiction under the Code of Civil Procedure. The latter procedure had repeatedly been found by the European Court to be in breach of the legal-certainty requirement, as the proceedings could last indefinitely through various levels and time-limits were too long or liable to be rendered nugatory. No such issue appeared to have arisen in the procedure that had been followed in the applicant company’s case. The binding and enforceable decisions delivered by the commercial courts in its favour had not been liable to challenge indefinitely, but only once, before a supreme judicial instance, at the defendant party’s request, on the basis of restricted grounds and within a clearly defined and limited time-frame. Supervisory review so construed was not incompatible with the principle of legal certainty and appeared as an ultimate element in the chain of domestic remedies at the disposal of the parties, rather than as an extraordinary means of reopening judicial proceedings. The fact that the judgments in the applicant company’s favour had been binding and enforceable before the supervisory review did not alter the Court’s conclusion as, firstly, the enforcement proceedings had been lawfully stayed pending the supervisory review and, secondly, a judgment that had become binding and enforceable was not necessarily final under the Convention: manifestly ill-founded.
See also MPP Golub v. Ukraine, no. 6778/05, ECHR 2005-XI, Information Note no. 79, and, on the question of the effectiveness of the new remedy for admissibility purposes, Kovaleva and Others v. Russia under Article 35 § 1 below.
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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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