ons 21 mar 2018, 23:33#504544
"The Court gives national authorities considerable discretion in this area, but
has qualified this by stating that it will respect their choice of method
unless it is “manifestly without reasonable foundation” (Lithgow judgment,
para. 122).119 This applied in the cases of Katikaridis v. Greece and
Tsomtos and Others v. Greece.
120 To prevent the owners of land expropriated
for road-building purposes from making unjustified profits, Greek law
declared that the project would benefit them, and that compensation
would be paid only for expropriated plots above a certain size.
The applicants took their case to the Greek Court of Cassation, which
made it an irrebutable presumption that they derived real benefits from
improvement of the road and construction of a cloverleaf junction – and
accordingly refused them compensation. The Strasbourg Court found the
system unduly rigid: “the compensation is in every case reduced by an
amount equal to the value of an area fifteen metres wide, without the
owners concerned being allowed to argue that in reality the effect of the
works concerned either has been of no benefit – or less benefit – to them
or has caused them to sustain varying degrees of loss” (para. 49). It
concluded that property rights had indeed been violated, and that the
offending law should thus be repealed. Even disregarding the applicants’
case, it found that the Greek law was “manifestly without reasonable
foundation” (para. 49). This made it unnecessary even to establish that the
applicants had actually suffered the effects of this system, since, “in the
case of a large number of owners, it necessarily upsets the fair balance
between the protection of the right to property and the requirements of
the general interest” [our italics] (para. 49). This is an exceptionally
noteworthy judgment, since in it the Court denounced a law as being in
fact unlawful."
https://www.echr.coe.int/LibraryDocs/DG ... ES-11(1998).pdf
Sid 40.