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February 11, 2001
Mr. Luzius Wildhaber, president of the European Court of Human Rights. Dear Sir, Our organization works since 1991 on restitutions in the Czech Republic. We have our own web site and some time ago I sent some literature about us to Mrs. Sally Dollé. The purpose of this letter is not to talk about injustices. This is your area of expertise. We wish to bring to your attention the impossible delays in the proceedings. We know that the Court is overwhelmed with thousands of applications but we also know that some cases are very complex and some are very straightforward. We also know that our claimants are 70, 80 and 90 years old. The Czech resistance to restitute the private property that has been seized and distributed to communist functionaries is also well known. Every week two or three of our claimants die. This, of course, suits well the Czech politicians because in five years all Czech claimants may be dead. There is one major and probably simple question. Is the exclusion from any restitutions of the United States citizens of Czech origin, who, according to the Czech position, lost their Czech citizenship by acquisition of the US citizenship right or wrong? We all know that the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations condemned this Czech attitude in their decision 516/92 – Šimůnek and decision 586/96 - Josef Frank Adam in which they also stated, that “With respect to the requirement of exhaustion of domestic remedies, the Committee recalls that only such remedies have to be exhausted which are both available and effective.” Is the position of the ECHR diametrically different? Cases of many of our members are known to us. In this letter we are bringing up two cases which we think are very simple and straightforward, namely 38645/97 Poláček and 39794/98 Gratzinger. May we have an answer from you or your office and not from the Czech section as there we have some doubts. Please look at our website. Yours truly Czech Coordinating Office, |