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LIABILITY OF THE STATE PARTIES FOR PECUNIARY DAMAGE CAUSED BY VIOLATION OF THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Nebojša Raičević
Zoran Radivojević

Abstract

The liability of States for pecuniary damage caused by a violation of the rights guaranteed by the Convention requires the cumulative fulfillment of three requirements. These requirements are not explicitly set out in the Convention but have been formulated in the extensive case-law of the ECtHR, by relying on tort law of the State Parties. The first requirement for liability is that there is a breach of the Convention as a wrongful act of the state. A violation of the Convention exists if the State Party has not complied with its obligations, either negative or positive. Thus, a State will be liable only for wrongful acts that are attributable to the State, i.e. for acts performed by its bodies or other entities that exercise elements of the governmental authority or act under the control of the State. The next condition is the existence of pecuniary damage. As the Convention does not contain a definition of pecuniary damage, the Court has taken its concept from the internal legal systems of European states. In its case-law, the Court awarded both compensation for sustained damage and for loss of profit. As there are no clear and precise criteria for calculating the amount of damages in the Convention and other ECtHR documents, the Court has a wide margin of appreciation. The third and the most complicated requirement for the liability of a State Party is the causal link between the wrongful act of the State and the damage caused. Like the national courts of most European countries, the Court first applies the but for test in order to determine the factual causality. Then, it establishes the legal causality, where the ECtHR has required a higher degree of causal connection. Unfortunately, the Court has never clarified what it was guided by when establishing sufficient causal connection. The Court judgments often contain vague and even contradictory explanations, which make it very difficult to formulate some general and definitive conclusions, especially concerning violations of procedural guarantees.

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PERIODICS Serbian Political Thought 1/2021 1/2021 УДК 341.231.14:341.645(4) 223-250
https://doi.org/10.22182/spm.7112021.10
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