The applicant, Sylvie Žáková, is a Czech national who was born in 1938 and lives in Landshut, Germany. She emigrated in 1968 from the then Czechoslovakia and in the 1970s all her property there – consisting in particular of one plot of land in the cadastral area of Třebíč - was seized by the communist regime. In 1991 the decisions on the seizure were declared null and void and Ms Žáková started renting the land to a municipality.
Relying on Article 1 (protection of property) of Protocol No. 1, she complained that in 1997 the Land Register entered the municipality as the sole owner of the property and, as a result, she effectively lost the ownership to the land. According to Ms Žáková, she had been registered as the sole owner of the land without interruption from 1960 until 1997. The Government maintained that she had lost ownership of the land in a decision of 1971 which had found her guilty of the offence of fleeing Czechoslovakia and that, after that, she had been registered as owner only as a result of a mistake.
The Court concluded that there was violation of Art. 1 of Protocol No. 1.
Just satisfaction: The Court held that the question of the application of Art. 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention was not ready for decision and reserved it.
