Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 99
July 2007
Poznanski and Others v. Germany - 25101/05
Decision 3.7.2007 [Section V]
Article 1 of Protocol No. 1
Article 1 para. 1 of Protocol No. 1
Deprivation of property
Extinguishment of civil claims in respect of forced labour under the Nazi regime by virtue of a law providing for a general compensation scheme: inadmissible
During the Second World War the applicants and their relatives, then Polish nationals, were subjected to forced labour in a concentration camp which was operated by an industrial corporation. In 1999 they sued the corporation’s legal successor for compensation. In August 2000 a law entered into force which provided for the establishment of a public-law foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” to oversee a scheme to compensate former forced labourers. The law stipulated that compensation could only be requested pursuant to its provisions and that all further claims against the German State and German companies became extinct. In 2001 the regional court rejected the applicants’ actions. They appealed unsuccessfully. They were subsequently granted payments under the new law.
Inadmissible: The applicants’ claims before the domestic courts, under the ordinary rules of tort law, had constituted “possessions”. As a result of the new law, they had lost their claims. The loss of claims had constituted a “deprivation of possessions”. Instead of having a claim, they had become eligible for, and received, compensation from the fund which had been set up by the Federal Republic of Germany and German industry. Since the law had, inter alia, been aimed at creating legal certainty for German industry and the German State, the replacement of the applicants’ claims could be considered to be “in the public interest”. The claims which the applicants had lost were not assets in the sense of matters which had a physical existence and a quantifiable value; indeed, the substance of the claims had not been adjudicated on and the applicants had never had the benefit of a final judgment in their favour. Moreover, the applicants’ actions had involved a challenge to the settled case-law, which indicated clearly that the actions would be time-barred. In this, the applicants’ loss had been substantially less than that suffered by applicants in cases where pending claims had had substantial prospects of success. Instead, they had been awarded the maximum amount available under the compensation scheme set up by the law (about EUR 7,700 each). Although their civil claims against the successor company had been for amounts considerably in excess of that figure, namely for the sums of between EUR 20,000 and 36,000, they could have been protracted and would have been subject to the usual risks of civil litigation, whereas the compensation payments had been made out of the fund with a minimum of formality and relatively speedily. Finally, the Court noted the substantial public interest in setting up the foundation to deal comprehensively with all compensation claims for forced labour under the Nazi regime. The interference with the applicants’ right of property had therefore not upset the “fair balance” which had to be struck between the protection of property and the requirements of the general interest: manifestly ill-founded.
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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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