The applicant, Yury Komissarov, is a Russian national who was born in 1968 and lives in Nizhny Novgorod (Russia). The case concerns the applicant’s detention pending extradition from the Czech Republic to Russia. In 1998 the applicant settled in the Czech Republic and was granted permanent residence there in 2000. Meanwhile, in 1999, he was indicted in Russia for fraud. Between 2005 and 2014 several requests were lodged by the Russian authorities for his extradition, and in 2015 it was ruled that he could be extradited. Following an unsuccessful constitutional appeal in February 2016 and the dismissal of his application for asylum, the applicant was surrendered to the Russian authorities in November 2017. The applicant complains under Article 5 § 1 (f) (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights that his detention pending extradition was excessively lengthy.

The Court noted that national legislation provides for separate time-limits when extradition and asylum procedures are concurrently processed and delivered. However, the decision must be taken without delay which according to the case law of the Supreme Administrative Court shall be at the latest sixty days for examination of an asylum application by the determining authority and sixty days for each level of  jurisdiction at second instance determination.

The Court found that “these time-limits have been greatly exceeded in the present case: the administrative decision to dismiss the applicant’s asylum application was only issued after eight months – that is to say four times longer than the maximum permissible period stipulated by the domestic law; the periods during which the case was examined at two separate judicial instances exceeded the respective prescribed time-limits as well. Thus, the asylum proceedings took almost seventeen months, instead of six months as provided by the domestic law.”

According to the ECtHR case law, the existence or absence of time-limits is one of a number of factors which might be taken into consideration in the overall assessment of whether domestic law was “sufficiently accessible, precise and foreseeable”. Even if fixed time-limits were complied with, it would still find an applicant’s detention to be in breach of Article 5 § 1(f) if deportation was not pursued with due diligence. The Court notes, however, where fixed time-limits exist, a failure to comply with them may be relevant to the question of “lawfulness”, as detention exceeding the period permitted by domestic law is unlikely to be considered to be “in accordance with the law”.

In the present case, the Court observed that the strict time-limits for examination of the asylum applications constitute an important safeguard against arbitrariness, but the domestic authorities neither acknowledged nor reacted to the serious delays in the proceedings, despite the applicant’s complaints regarding those delays.

“In particular, the decision of the Constitutional Court of 13 December 2016 was rendered at a point when the applicant’s asylum procedure had exceeded by more than three times the uttermost time-limit prescribed by the domestic law for the examination of asylum applications and had even exceeded the total period of six months allowed for the examination of asylum appeals as the statutorily maximum permissible length.”

Due to serious delays in asylum proceedings, and the length of the length of the detention pending extradition, which lasted eighteen months, beyond national time limits, the Court found a violation of Article 5 § 1 (f) ECHR.