Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 121
July 2009
Skiba v. Poland (dec.) - 10659/03
Decision 7.7.2009 [Section IV]
Article 11
Article 11-1
Freedom of peaceful assembly
Imposition of a fine for presiding over a peaceful meeting without giving prior notice to the authorities: inadmissible
The applicant was vice-president of an association whose purpose was to defend Christian values in Poland. In 2002 the association was told that an exhibition was to be inaugurated two days later in a modern art gallery which certain Catholic circles considered contrary to their religion. When the exhibition opened, thirty-odd members of the association, including the applicant, gathered outside the gallery in the centre of Cracow. For about forty-five minutes they displayed banners and distributed leaflets to passers-by explaining that they were protesting against the exhibition concerned. The applicant, who was leading the demonstration, spoke to the crowd with a loud-hailer and led them in prayer before bringing the meeting to a close. A police officer who was standing nearby then approached the applicant to check his identity. The applicant was subsequently fined approximately EUR 100 for organising a public meeting without first notifying the authorities. The applicant’s lawyer appealed. He pointed out that as his client had found out about the exhibition only two days before the opening, it had not been possible for him to notify the authorities three days in advance as required by law. He stressed that the demonstration had been part of the peaceful debate on the exhibition, which had caused a public outrage and which the members of the applicant’s association considered blasphemous. He argued, inter alia, that the demonstration would have been meaningless had it been held at another time or place. The regional court rejected the appeal, holding that the things the applicant had said during the demonstration were irrelevant to the case because he had been fined solely for failing to give the authorities the requisite prior notification.
Inadmissible: The applicant’s conviction amounted to an interference with his right to freedom of assembly. In this case he had been punished not for having taken part in a public meeting as such, nor for having made any particular statement in public, but for having knowingly disregarded the domestic law under which, as the organiser of the planned public meeting, he was required to give the authorities prior notice. The aim of this law was not to arbitrarily restrict the exercise of the right in question but rather to give the authorities a reasonable amount of time to take adequate steps to reconcile the exercise by certain people of their right to freedom of peaceful assembly, on the one hand, with the legitimate rights and interests of other people, including freedom of movement, but also to uphold law and order and prevent crime. That being so, the obligation on the applicant under domestic law could not be considered an excessive or unreasonable requirement capable of surreptitiously restricting his right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Even though, as the applicant argued, the information about the exhibition had reached him too late for him to give the authorities the requisite three days’ notice, nothing in the case file indicated that the authorities could be held in any way responsible for this. In spite of the fact that there had still been time for him to notify the authorities before going ahead with the demonstration, the applicant had made no attempt to do so, probably for fear that the authorities would prohibit the gathering. However, the applicant had submitted no evidence to the domestic courts or to the Strasbourg Court to prove that such fears might have been well-founded. It could not be said, therefore, that the applicant’s right to hold the meeting overrode his duty to inform the authorities, particularly considering that he had never claimed that the demonstration had been a spontaneous event. It was important that associations and other organisers of demonstrations should play by the democratic rules they helped to defend, by respecting the regulations in force. In this particular case, although the authorities had not been informed of the demonstration in advance, and although it had taken place in a central location and could have obstructed people’s freedom of movement, the authorities had shown tolerance and the applicant had been able to exercise his right to freedom of assembly as intended. Lastly, the authorities had shown the necessary restraint when sentencing the applicant: they had taken into account the fact he had no criminal record and that the demonstration had been a peaceful one, and they had opted for the most lenient sentence. This attitude on the part of the authorities could not have any chilling effect on the applicant. His conviction did not appear to have been based on the authorities’ desire to punish him for what he had said at the meeting or for the ideas or values he was defending. On the contrary, the courts had made it quite clear that the purpose of the fine was merely to prevent similar situations from arising in the future. Accordingly, the applicant’s criminal conviction did not appear disproportionate to the legitimate aims pursued: manifestly ill-founded.
(See also Bukta and Others v. Hungary, no. 25691/04, Information Note no. 99, and Éva Molnár v. Hungary, no. 10346/05, Information Note no. 112).
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