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The issue of expropriated church property has come up again, this time in Poland.
Background
In Christian Baptist Church in Wrocław v Poland [2018] ECHR (no. 32045/10 , the Church applied to the Governor of Wrocław In May 1996 for a decision confirming its ownership of a four-storey building that had previously belonged to it but which had been transferred to the State during the Communist regime. The Governor refused on the grounds that the Church had not fulfilled the requirements of the Relations Between the Republic of Poland and the Christian Baptist Church Act of 30 June 1995, “specifically that it had not possessed the property in question on the day of entry into force of the Act relied upon” [17]. The Church launched further administrative and court proceedings, in June 2007 the Governor of Lower Silesia refused to return the property and in October 2009 the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the Church’s appeal [46].
The Church complained of a violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of property) and that the proceedings had been unfair and excessively long, contrary to Article 6 §1 (right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time).
The Constitutional Court had found in its judgment of 8 November 2005 that “the property in question was owned by the Bund Evangelisch Freikirschlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland … and not by the Christian Baptist Church or its legal entities (including the Baptist community)” and that the Christian Baptist Church in Gdańsk had not able to prove that it was the legal successor of the Bund Evangelisch Freikirschlicher Gemeinden [53]. Therefore:
“Even assuming that on the basis of section 4 of the amended 1995 Act the property has been acquired ex lege (although the Constitutional Court does not share this opinion), acquiring the property in question ex lege is excluded because of the lack of the legal succession. It follows that the [Constitutional] Court does not share the complainant’s view presented at the hearing that there were statutory conditions for return of the property” [54].
The First Section ECtHR dismissed the Government’s plea of inadmissibility on grounds of […]