Price of Constitutional Right of Access to Court in Administrative Offenses and Criminal Cases

Both administrative offenses’ and criminal procedure legal regulation did not provide for the possibility to reimburse the lawyer’s fees for a person who has not committed a violation of law and his case was terminated, e. g. in cases where the person concerned succeeded to prove his innocence. Thus, the person who applied to a court for the protection of his violated rights could find himself/herself in a worse situation because he/she used the assistance of a lawyer to defend his/her violated rights, as the lawyer’s fees incurred by him/her could be higher than the consequences of an administrative offence ruling (such as the amount of an administrative penalty), compared to the situation where he/she would have been if he/she had not defended his/her violated rights. The aforementioned legal regulation was recognised as contradictory to the Constitution by Constitutional Court’s Ruling of 19 March 2021. Constitutional principle of the access to court and the right to the effective judicial protection presuppose the obligation for the legislator to establish such a legal regulation under which the right of a person to defend his/her rights in a court, inter alia, through legal assistance provided by a lawyer, would be exercised in reality and effectively. This means that it should be provided by law that the necessary and reasonable expenses incurred in the exercise of this right of a person that is not subject to legal responsibility, as it has not been established that he/ she has committed a violation of law, would be reimbursed. Such a constitutional decision will likely prevent the new petitions before the European Court of Human Rights that in one of recent cases has already recognised the violation of Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights and has accepted for consideration another case that is very similar to the one, examined by the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania