FIFTH SECTION
DECISION
Application no. 59372/08
Valeriya Sergeyevna TKACHENKO
against Ukraine
The European Court of Human Rights (Fifth Section), sitting on 22 May 2018 as a Committee composed of:
Erik Møse, President,
Síofra O’Leary,
Lәtif Hüseynov, judges,
and Milan Blaško, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to the above application lodged on 28 November 2008,
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
THE FACTS
1. The applicant, Ms Valeriya Sergeyevna Tkachenko, is a Ukrainian national, who was born on 12 August 1989 and lives in Snizhne. She was represented by Mr O. Tkachenko, who had represented her also in the domestic proceedings, as described below.
2. The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicant, may be summarised as follows.
3. In 2001 the applicant, who was 12 years old at the time, was placed into public care as a child deprived of parental care. The authorities of her hometown of Torez exercised the guardianship.
4. In September 2004 the guardianship was transferred to the authorities of Snizhne, where the applicant started to study at a vocational school - State-sponsored education designed to provide technical skills required to perform the tasks of a particular and specific job, in the applicant’s case that of professional hairdresser. During her studies the applicant lived at the school’s dormitory and was officially registered at that address.
5. In June 2007 she finished her studies and the authorities decided to transfer the guardianship back to the Torez authorities, which were thus required to provide the applicant with dwelling and assist her in finding a job. Accordingly, her official registration in Snizhne was annulled.
6. The applicant refused to leave Snizhne for Torez and petitioned the authorities of Snizhne to provide her with a dwelling and to help her find a job in that town.
7. Eventually, the applicant was provided with a flat in Snizhne and also with a financial contribution to the costs of the necessary repair works therein. She was registered at the address of that dwelling. With the assistance of the authorities, she worked temporarily as a trainee at a private hair salon.
8. In 2008 the applicant instituted different sets of proceedings, challenging the Snizhne authorities’ decision transferring the guardianship to the Torez authorities, alleging that the Snizhne authorities had failed to provide her with financial, housing and employment assistance in accordance with the relevant provisions of the domestic law and also claiming compensation on that account.
9. Those claims were examined on the merits by courts at three levels of jurisdiction in the framework of three separate sets of proceedings. The final decisions on the merits were taken by the Higher Administrative Court on 14 October 2009, 20 October 2010 and 14 April 2011, respectively. Part of the applicant’s claims were allowed, notably those concerning certain irregularities in the way the authorities had dealt with the applicant’s housing request, while her other claims were dismissed as unsubstantiated.
10. In particular, when dismissing her claims, the courts found that the authorities had duly fulfilled their obligations towards the applicant and relied in that regard on different pieces of documentary evidence and statements of witnesses. The applicant’s representative had taken part in the oral hearings before the courts of first and appeal instances and had challenged the admissibility and evidential weight of the material on which the courts based their decisions. In the proceedings before the courts of appeal and cassation instances, the applicant’s representative made oral and written submissions that some of the documents had been falsified, that the lower courts had either ignored or misinterpreted his comments in that regard, that the verbatim records of the oral hearings had not accurately reflected all what had been stated by those taking part in those hearings, and that the lower courts had refused to issue officially certified copies of documents contained in the case-file. Ultimately, those allegations were dismissed as unfounded, the higher courts having found no irregularities in the way the lower courts had assessed the evidence or applied the relevant law.
COMPLAINTS
11. The applicant complained under Article 6 § 1 of the Convention of the outcome and unfairness of the proceedings in her case. In particular, she argued that the court decisions had been unlawful and had been based on falsified documents, that her representative’s arguments and documentary evidence had been either ignored or misinterpreted by the courts, that the verbatim records of the oral hearings had not adequately reflected the submissions made by those taking part in the hearings, and that the courts had refused to issue officially certified copies of documents from the case‑file. She also argued that the judges had interfered, in an improper manner, with the questioning of the parties by her representative, without providing dates or other details in that regard.
12. The applicant complained under Articles 13 and 14 of the Convention that, because of the alleged irregularities in the proceedings, she had had no effective remedy as regards the alleged violation of her substantive rights under the domestic law and the international law applicable in the field of childcare and that she had been subjected to discriminatory treatment in the proceedings.
13. The applicant also complained under Article 2 of Protocol No. 4 on account of the annulment of her official registration in Snizhne in 2007 (see paragraph 5 above).
14. Finally, she complained under Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 that, as a consequence of the annulment of her official registration in Snizhne in June 2007, she had not been able to cast her vote in the parliamentary elections in September 2007.
THE LAW
15. In so far as the applicant complained under Article 6 § 1 of the Convention about the outcome and unfairness of the domestic proceedings, the Court reiterates that it is not a court of fourth instance and it is not its function to deal with alleged errors of fact or law committed by a national court, unless and in so far as they may have infringed rights and freedoms protected by the Convention (see García Ruiz v. Spain [GC], no. 30544/96, § 28, ECHR 1999‑I). While Article 6 of the Convention guarantees the right to a fair hearing, it does not lay down any rules on the admissibility of evidence or the way in which evidence should be assessed, these being primarily matters for regulation by national law and the national courts. Normally, issues such as the weight attached by the national courts to given items of evidence or to findings or assessments in issue before them for consideration are not for the Court to review (see, among many other authorities, Bochan v. Ukraine (no. 2) [GC], no. 22251/08, § 61, ECHR 2015).
16. The Court notes that the principal issue in all three sets of domestic proceedings in the present case was whether the authorities had provided the applicant with financial, housing and employment assistance in 2007 in the manner and to the extent required by the domestic law. Essentially, the domestic courts found that the majority of the applicants’ allegations in that regard had been unsubstantiated and that the authorities had acted in accordance with the law. Having regard to the material submitted to the Court by the applicant, it finds no reason to disagree with those findings or to consider them as arbitrary or manifestly unreasonable. Nor did the applicant demonstrate that in the proceedings she or her representative had been placed at a substantial disadvantage vis-à-vis the opposite party. The applicant’s representative had made oral and written submissions before the courts at three levels of jurisdiction and had been given ample opportunity to put forward and argue the applicant’s case and to comment and contest the evidence and submissions made by the opposite party. In the light of the documents before it, the Court finds no indication that the requirements of fairness under Article 6 § 1 of the Convention were not respected in the present case.
17. It follows that the applicant’s complaints under that provision are manifestly ill-founded and must be rejected in accordance with Article 35 §§ 3 (a) and 4 of the Convention.
18. Likewise, the applicant’s essentially same complaints under Articles 13 and 14 of the Convention should be rejected as manifestly ill‑founded pursuant to Article 35 §§ 3 (a) and 4 of the Convention.
19. Finally, the Court notes that the applicant did not provide any evidence or detailed argument that she had not been able to cast her vote in the parliamentary elections in 2012 or that her freedom to choose her residence had actually been restricted. Thus, her complaints under Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 2 of Protocol No. 4 are wholly unsubstantiated and should also be rejected pursuant to Article 35 §§ 3 (a) and 4 of the Convention.
For these reasons, the Court, unanimously,
Declares the application inadmissible.
Done in English and notified in writing on 14 June 2018.
Milan BlaškoErik Møse
Deputy RegistrarPresident
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy