RIVADULLA DURÓ v. SPAIN DECISION
constitutional significance. The Court has found that the requirement to
justify the special constitutional significance of such an appeal is in
accordance with the Convention (see Arribas Antón v. Spain, no. 16563/11,
§§ 45-48, 20 January 2015). It has also considered that subjecting the
admissibility of an amparo appeal to the existence of objective circumstances
and their justification by the applicant, these being criteria provided for by
law and interpreted in constitutional case-law, is not in itself disproportionate
(ibid.).
20. Subsequently, noting that the machinery of protection established by
the Convention is subsidiary to the national systems safeguarding human
rights, the Court has reiterated that those who wish to invoke its supervisory
jurisdiction as concerns complaints against a State are obliged to use first the
remedies provided by the national legal system (see Álvarez Juan v. Spain
(dec.), no. 33799/16, § 34, 29 September 2020, and Morales Rodríguez and
Vázquez Moreno v. Spain (dec.), nos. 3696/16 and 4503/16, § 27,
24 November 2020).
21. The Court has held that where an applicant is responsible for an
irremediable flaw, such as failure to provide any, or sufficient, justification
of the particular constitutional significance of an appeal, the applicant has not
properly exhausted domestic remedies. It has found that when an amparo
appeal is rejected on the grounds that the applicant had not justified its special
constitutional significance, or had failed to justify it adequately, this implied
a lack of diligence for which the applicant alone was responsible, with the
result that his or her application to the Court would be declared inadmissible
for failure to exhaust domestic remedies (see Álvarez Juan, § 51, and Morales
Rodríguez and Vázquez Moreno, §§ 40 and 41, both cited above).
22. The Court has nonetheless also emphasised that in cases in which an
amparo appeal was declared inadmissible owing to insufficient justification
of its special constitutional significance, the risk that that assessment might
have involved excessive formalism could not be ruled out. Therefore,
the Court considers that, while it is not its task to take the place of the
Constitutional Court of a member State in assessing the admissibility criteria
for an appeal, it is for the Court to verify that the assessment made by the
Constitutional Court in this respect is not so formalistic as to restrict a
litigant’s access to an effective remedy. The Court must therefore assess the
specific circumstances of each case (see Morales Rodríguez and Vázquez
Moreno, cited above, § 44).
23. However, in the present case the Court is not called upon to resolve
this question, as it considers that the complaint is in any event inadmissible
for the reasons set out below.
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