BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 17. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled in favor of Latvia in the case Osis v. Latvia, rejecting the applicant’s complaint of a potential violation of the right to a fair trial under Article 6, paragraph 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Trend reports.
The complaint, submitted by the applicant in 2018, alleged that national courts had failed to ensure a reasonable length of criminal proceedings related to serious tax evasion charges. However, on June 26, 2025, a three-judge Committee of the Court concluded that the case was inadmissible due to the applicant's failure to observe the six-month time limit for filing complaints, as set out in Article 35 of the Convention.
The Court emphasized that a request to reopen national proceedings cannot be used to reset the six-month time period. Since the final domestic ruling against the applicant was delivered on June 22, 2017, and the ECHR application was lodged more than a year later, on June 29, 2018, the Court dismissed the complaint as inadmissible. The Committee’s decision is final and cannot be appealed.
The full decision, issued on June 26, 2025, is available in English via the Court’s public case-law database. The case can be found by searching with application number 31624/18 and the decision date 26/06/2025.