Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 99
July 2007
Thiermann and Others v. Norway - 18712/03
Decision 8.3.2007 [Section I]
Article 3
Degrading treatment
Inhuman treatment
Treatment allegedly endured as “war children” born out of the Nazi “Lebensborn” scheme and authorities’ subsequent failure to take any remedial measures: inadmissible
The applicants (over 150 altogether) all have a Norwegian mother and a German father and were born during the Second World War. A number of them were registered as children of “Lebensborn”, a Nazi scheme, introduced by Heinrich Himmler in 1935, to create children who were deemed racially and genetically pure. In 1940-45 some 10-12,000 children were born in Norway with a Norwegian mother and a German father, being referred to as “war children”. Various public officials publicly denounced the war children, claiming that they were mentally and genetically defective and potential Nazi sympathisers.
In 1999 seven applicants brought unsuccessful damage proceedings against the State, claiming to have been subjected tovarious forms of ill-treatment, harassment and discrimination. Many war children had been deprived of their original names and identity, subjected to discrimination, harassment and ill‑treatment and left with psychological problems and registered disabled at an early age. Some had been placed in psychiatric institutions without adequate prior expert assessment and several had been refused baptism certificates.
In 2001 a city court ruled that the applicants’ compensation claims had been submitted too late. The High Court unanimously upheld the judgment and the Appeals Selection Committee of the Supreme Court refused leave to appeal. A number of the other applicants also brought proceedings which were stayed pending a legally enforceable decision in the case brought by the first seven applicants.
Inadmissible: The Court found no reason to call into doubt the domestic courts’ assessment that the claims against the State had fallen within the provisions of the Damage Compensation Act 1969 and section 9 of the Limitation Act 1979 and that the first seven applicants’ claims had become time-barred at the latest in 1985, 20 years after the youngest of them had reached the age of 21.The Court nevertheless went on to consider whether there were any special circumstances which might have absolved the applicants from their normal obligation to exhaust domestic remedies within the applicable statutory time-limits.
In this regard, the Court observed that the individual statements provided by the first group of seven applicants contained harrowing accounts of personal experiences of social ostracism and social exclusion. However, the impugned statements made by certain public officials and the contested political decisions and legislative measures taken by the authorities had essentially predated the entry into force of the Convention with respect to Norway in 1953. Moreover, the alleged experiences of harassment and abuse had consisted essentially of instantaneous acts which, despite their ensuing effects, had not given rise to any possible continuous situation of a violation of the Convention. Against this background the Court found nothing to indicate that since the Convention entered into force in respect of Norway there had been an administrative practice vis-à-viswar children consisting of a repetition of acts incompatible with the Convention and an official tolerance by the authorities of the respondent State, of such a nature as to make proceedings futile or ineffective and to render the exhaustion rule inapplicable.
Neither had it been suggested that by the time the disputed 20-year time bar expired in 1985 the applicants had been unaware of the instances of misplacement, ill-treatment, harassment and discrimination to which they had allegedly been subjected. In sum, there was nothing to indicate that the application of the 20-year time bar had entailed an arbitrary limitation on the applicants’ right to pursue their compensation claims against the State or that any other special reasons existed which could have dispensed them from the requirement to exhaust domestic remedies. Non-exhaustion.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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