Two years after the Czech Constitutional Court abolished "benefit-free zones", people evicted through such measures still wait for justice
It was August 2021 when, after almost four years, the Czech Constitutional Court finally ruled on a motion from a group of senators to abolish a part of the law on aid to those in material distress authorizing local authorities to issue "measures of a general nature" through which they could deprive people who were newly concluding rental or sublet leases of their right to a housing benefit in places considered to have increased levels of "socially undesirable phenomena". Coincidentally, in August 2023, the issue of these so-called "benefit-free zones" made it before the Constitutional Court once more, this time on the basis of a constitutional complaint filed by a young family with five children who, as a consequence of such "measures of a general nature", lost their housing on 1 July 2018 in one of two residential hotels which closed down in Ústí nad Labem (along with approximately 220 other people).
Getting rid of the “inadaptables”
Representatives of the City of Ústí nad Labem were indisputably among the most visible fans of the new legal opportunity to institute “benefit-free zones” when it became possible to do so. MUDr. Jiří Madar, who was Vice-Mayor at the time, spoke on the city’s YouTube channel and to the national media in an absolutely open way about the fact that the city wanted to adjust the composition of its population in terms of social status by declaring “benefit-free zones” and getting rid of the people whom he himself labeled “inadaptables”.
In February 2018, “measures of a general nature” were issued defining the first “benefit-free zones” in Ústí nad Labem. Klišská Street and Purkyňova Street were included among those zones, where the residential hotels occupied predominantly by Romani people were located.
The residential hotel operators offered accommodation just on the basis of short-term leases, but those leases had always been regularly renewed and the inhabitants of the properties relied on that renewal. With the declaration of the “benefit-free zones”, however, it became apparent to the operators of the residential hotels that many of their tenants would lose their entitlement to housing benefits once their leases expired and new ones were concluded, and so the operators decided to close their facilities.
The occupants learned they would have to move out of their housing about a month in advance, first from social media and only then from the operators of the residential hotels themselves. In this urgent situation, they turned to the city with a request for aid, appealing to the city to meet its obligations flowing from their right to housing and to arrange alternative accommodation for them.
However, the city responded that it had no such plans. The young family mentioned above decided to file a lawsuit over the city having declared the “measures of a general nature”, arguing that those measures were an unlawful interference with their rights and moving that the measures be rescinded.
Conditioning the right to housing on the existence of a law regulating it
The Regional Court in Ústí nad Labem first severed the question of the lawfulness of the “measures of a general nature” from the question of the family requesting that the city provide them alternate housing. However, by doing so, the court artificially distorted the facts of the situation the family faced in reality.
The court turned their eviction, which was a direct, planned repercussion of city policy, into a purely private law matter between the family and the operator of the residential hotel with regard to the extension of their lease. The family’s lawsuit was first declared inadmissible and then, after the family successfully defended themselves against that decision before the Supreme Administrative Court, was heard and rejected.
The central point of the Regional Court’s argument was a provision of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms that gives effect to economic, social and cultural rights, which traditionally include the right to housing, only within the limits of laws implementing those rights. However, there is no law in the Czech Republic that covers the right to housing.
The law on municipalities has a regulation that says a municipality is in charge, among other matters, of satisfying the need for housing, but according to the Regional Court, that regulation does not anchor an enforceable right and just defines the city’s independent purview on this issue. Discrimination as an issue, therefore, was something the Regional Court refused to review, claiming that an antidiscrimination lawsuit should be used to protect people from discrimination, not a lawsuit claiming an illegal intervention.
The family then turned to the Supreme Administrative Court. They filed a cassation complaint there in November 2020, i.e., before the Constitutional Court overturned these problematic legal regulations authorizing local adoption of “benefit-free zones” in August 2021.
The Constitutional Court decision brought the family hope that the Supreme Administrative Court might agree with their arguments. However, that hope was dashed in May 2023, when it upheld the Regional Court decision to reject their lawsuit.
The “horizontal relationship” between municipalities and their populations and the Olomouc precedent
As it happens, a far greater role than the Constitutional Court’s decision to overturn the legal regulation of “benefit-free zones” (which the Supreme Administrative Court did not even mention) was played by a different Constitutional Court decision. In May 2023, the Constitutional Court issued another decision on a case filed by a Romani family seeking court protection for their right to housing and their right not to be discriminated against when accessing housing, although their circumstances were different than those of the evicted family from Ústí nad Labem.
This other Romani family tried to enforce protection against the housing policy of the City of Olomouc, which was implemented in a segregatory way through the system for awarding leases to tenants residing in municipally-owned apartments, a system which disadvantaged the applicants and was untransparent, among other matters. The Constitutional Court finding on this case raised the need to adopt legislation regulating social housing, but rejected the family’s complaint because they do not have any right vis-à-vis the City of Olomouc for the city to arrange adequate housing for them.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms played a role in that decision too, specifically its provision stating that social rights can only be enforced within the framework of the laws that implement them. Moreover, the Constitutional Court expressly labeled the relationship between a municipality on the one hand and its population on the other as a “horizontal relationship”, i.e., a relationship that is no different, essentially, than that between two private parties.
While the Constitutional Court’s appeal for a law on social housing to be adopted in its justification of its ruling may have a certain moral authority, when it comes to legal repercussions it has no more weight, for example, than an article on such a subject in the media. The Supreme Administrative Court, therefore, in its decision to reject the cassation complaint of the family from Ústí nad Labem, based its own argument chiefly on this “horizontal nature” of the relationship between a municipality and its population and, in the absence of any legal regulations charging municipalities with special responsibilities in this regard, found it is not possible to infer any such obligations from the human right to housing.
The Supreme Administrative Court also did not manage to take into account the specifics of this case, which consisted of the fact that the family’s loss of their housing in Ústí nad Labem was not just a direct repercussion of city policy, but was even the declared aim of that policy in the name of the city’s efforts to adjust the composition of its population in terms of social status. On the contrary, the court approached the case of this family in a totally technical fashion, saying that while their arguments referencing the city’s declared plan to evict a certain group of people would have been relevant if the proceedings were about abolishing “measures of a general nature”, they were not relevant to a proceedings about the city’s obligation to arrange alternative housing for evictees.
The Czech court system is incapable of providing human rights protections
This family’s story will now continue with another complaint before the Constitutional Court, but if the court persists with its opinion that the relationship between municipalities and their populations is a “horizontal” one when it comes to housing issues, this case will apparently end up before an international human rights body. Right now, though, this story raises many questions.
The crucial question, obviously, is how it is possible that the City of Ústí nad Labem managed to achieve its openly segregratory aims without having to bear any legal liability vis-à-vis the affected people. Even the Constitutional Court decision overturning the legal regulation of “benefit-free zones” has changed nothing about that fact.
Indeed, that overturning of those regulations never could have changed the fact that residents have no such claims on municipalities. The decision to overturn such regulations was made too late, more than three and a half years after a group of senators delivered their motion to overturn it and more than four years after the regulations had taken effect.
This discrepancy between human rights protections and that legal regulation was apparent from the beginning and more than one human rights body drew attention to that fact, including international ones, e.g., the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the UN Human Rights Committee. The Constitutional Court’s delay in ruling on this issue not only caused these “benefit-free zones” to be declared in practice without encountering any difficulty, but also meant that it was hard for victims of this policy to defend themselves against the effects of any specifically-adopted “measures of a general nature”, as the example of the family in the case described above shows.
The family had also proposed a motion to overturn those “measures of a general nature”, but the proceedings on that motion were suspended until the Constitutional Court decided the issue. That suspension was not even announced until June 2020, i.e., two years after the motion was filed; the Regional Court did nothing with the case that entire time.
Another important question sparked by this family’s story is the meaning, in practice, of the right to adequate housing and of human rights writ large. There is no doubt that this family was victimized by legal regulations violating their human rights, and the Constitutional Court decision is testament to that fact, as it decided those legal regulations should be vacated.
While the family did its best to seek the protection of the courts in a timely manner, so far they have not succeeded. On the one hand, time was allowed to pass differently – more slowly – for the courts than it did for the family, and on the other hand, the courts dissected the family’s story into separate parts which it declared unrelated before concluding that there was no interference with the family’s rights and that the family should have defended itself by other means.
The outcome of these proceedings, therefore, has so far just been a series of variations on the theme of “the operation was successful, the patient died” – “You do have a right to adequate housing, but it ends there. Don’t expect anything more.”
The Czech courts have not provided these evicted families with either justice or protection.
Will a new law on housing support mean better times ahead?
One final issue that goes beyond the matter of the “benefit-free zones” is directly related to this family’s story, and that is the question of the sustainability of the conclusion that a municipality does not have any special responsibilities vis-à-vis its population with regard to their right to housing – that the relationship between a municipality and its population is purely “horizontal”. Resolution of that issue will be the key to the success or the failure of the second constitutional complaint that the family has brought before the Constitutional Court.
If the Constitutional Court persists with its conclusion that a municipality has no such responsibility, the emptiness of the right to adequate housing will persist in practice in the Czech environment. Change in that regard cannot be expected, unfortunately, not even from the newly drafted bill on housing support that is currently under discussion, because even if it is adopted, that law will not resolve the question of a claim to housing.
The proposed legislation will just anchor support mechanisms in law for facilitating access to housing and for increasing its affordability, so it certainly will increase the chance that more people will access housing. However, without the existence of an entitlement to housing provision, and without a clearly-established obligation on the part of municipalities to fulfill such an entitlement, this bill will not fill the hole that the Constitutional Court has now dug with its conclusion that the relationship between municipalities and their populations is a “horizontal” one.
The people whom municipalities consider “inadaptable” and therefore unwelcome in their populations will still be in a position to fall into that hole.
