| Applicant name | Reznik |
| Applicant type | natural person |
| Number of applicants | 4 |
| Country | Ukraine |
| Application no. | 31175/14 |
| Date | 23/01/2025 |
| Judges | Mattias Guyomar, President, María Elósegui, Stéphanie Mourou-Vikström, Gilberto Felici, Andreas Zünd, Kateřina Šimáčková, Mykola Gnatovskyy |
| Institution | Court |
| Type | Judgment |
| Outcome Art. 8 | Violation |
| Reason | Not necessary (prevention of crime) |
| Type of privacy | Locational privacy; procedural privacy |
| Keywords | Search home |
| Facts of the case | The first applicant (for the sake of simplicity also referred to from this paragraph to paragraph 91 below as “the applicant”) complained that the search of his home and the seizure of material there had been unlawful and unjustified, and that there had been no effective remedies for him to have his grievances addressed at the domestic level. He referred to Articles 8 and 13 of the Convention |
| Analysis | Given the broad scope of the warrant, the Court will examine whether that breadth was offset by the implementation, in practice, of sufficient procedural safeguards to protect the applicant against abuse or arbitrariness during the implementation of the search operation. In this respect, the Court notes, on the one hand, that the police officers carried out the disputed search operation in the presence of the applicant himself, two attesting lay witnesses, and three representatives of the Bar Association, who took an active role and filed comments and objections. Notwithstanding the above, given that those objections were of no practical effect, the Bar Association’s representatives had no power to prevent the police officers from seizing any items they considered necessary. Neither it is apparent that either a Bar Association’s representative or any other independent observer had any control over the subsequent sifting of the material on the electronic carriers which were removed from the applicant’s home without their content being checked. The Court notes that having been removed from the applicant’s home, these electronic carriers were sent for an examination by external technical experts, who were requested to identify and extract, in addition to any documents mentioned in the search warrant, any documents dealing with a wider circle of companies and individuals, as well as any correspondence and any deleted items. While it has not been argued by the applicant that any privileged material had in fact been extracted from the aforementioned data carriers, the Court finds that the very fact that a lawyer’s electronic devices which could potentially contain such material were seized, removed and accessed by officials without any external supervision or other safeguards being required, amounted, in the Court’s view, to a disproportionate interference with the applicant’s Convention rights. The Court also observes that those devices were then kept by the authorities for a considerable period of time , for which no justification is discernible either from the file or from the Government’s submissions. |
| Other Article violation? | Article 13 |
| Damage awarded | that the respondent State is to pay the first applicant, within three months from the date on which the judgment becomes final in accordance with Article 44 § 2 of the Convention, the following amounts, to be converted into the currency of the respondent State at the rate applicable at the date of settlement: (i) EUR 6,000 (six thousand euros), plus any tax that may be chargeable, in respect of non-pecuniary damage; (ii) EUR 3,450 (three thousand four hundred and fifty euros), plus any tax that may be chargeable to the first applicant, in respect of costs and expenses, to be transferred directly to the account of the applicant’s lawyer, Mr Tarakhkalo[9]; (b) that from the expiry of the above-mentioned three months until settlement simple interest shall be payable on the above amounts at a rate equal to the marginal lending rate of the European Central Bank during the default period plus three percentage points; |
| Documents | Judgment |