CEDH · CASELAW;DECISIONS;ADMISSIBILITYCOM;ENG — 9 septembre 2025

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(“the applicant”), who was born in 1976, lives in Budapest and was represented by Mr A. Takács, a lawyer practising in Szigetszentmiklós; the decision to give notice of the application to the Hungarian Government (“the Government”), represented by their Agent, Mr Z. Tallódi, of the Ministry of Justice; the decision not to have the applicant’s name disclosed; the parties’ observations; Having deliberated, decides as follows: SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE 1.     The case concerns the applicant’s complaint about the loss of contact with his son due to the alleged failure of the domestic courts to conduct, in a fair and expeditious manner, the proceedings on custody and contact rights and to prevent parental alienation. It raises issues under Article   8 of the Convention. 2.     The applicant’s son was born on 24 November 2007. The parents’ relationship soon deteriorated, leading to their separation. Their son remained in the care of the applicant’s ex-partner. For many years the applicant exercised his contact rights based on his agreement with his ex-partner. 3.     The applicant’s son has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and activity and attention deficit disorder. 4.     On 9 March 2017 the applicant initiated custody and contact proceedings against his ex-partner in respect of their son. 5.     The case was transferred to the Pécs District Court in June 2017 for lack of territorial jurisdiction. 6 .     At a hearing held on 26 September 2017 the parties reached an agreement which was approved by the District Court. The applicant was granted contact with his son every second weekend from 6 p.m. on Friday to 6   p.m. on Sunday and during the second half of the autumn and winter school holidays. 7.     The applicant could exercise his contact rights according to the above arrangement until the first two weeks he spent with his son during the summer of 2018, after which his son was only willing to meet him for a short period and refused to go anywhere with him. 8.     From 27 August 2018 onwards the applicant informed the guardianship authorities of several unsuccessful attempts to maintain contact according to the original agreement. The guardianship authority suspended the enforcement proceedings in view of a pending mediation process between the parties that took place from the spring of 2019 with the involvement of the child welfare services ( családsegítő és gyermekjóléti központ ). 9.     On 5 July 2019 the parties reached an agreement: the applicant was to pick up his son from the local child welfare service and to return him there, in the framework of supervised contact during the summer period. 10.     According to the child welfare service, even though the parties showed up at the centre on every occasion, the applicant’s son refused to leave with the applicant. The communication between them remained brief despite the staff’s efforts to facilitate the re-establishment of meaningful contact and to improve communication between them. The applicant’s son was visibly anxious in his father’s presence and was referring to several old grievances and bad experiences during previous visitation times with him. 11 .     In light of the above, the District Court ruled in an interim measure that until the final conclusion of the lawsuit the applicant was to exercise supervised contact on every second Saturday between 9 a.m. and 12   noon on the premises of the local child welfare service. After ten successful contacts, the applicant would have had the right to take his son away from the centre during these occasions. 12 .     The District Court had to adjudicate several requests by the parties to adopt interim measures. It appointed an expert psychologist and, at the applicant’s request, heard witnesses. The expert was also heard several times. 13.     In the expert’s opinion the relationship between the child and the father had been damaged from the very beginning, as there had been no imprinting between the two. It took years for the applicant to develop a deeper relationship with his son. However, by the time of the given stage of the contact rights proceedings, the relationship between the applicant and his son had broken down and the child had rejected his father. The expert found no direct maternal influence behind this rejection. 14.     In its judgment of 19 May 2020 the District Court upheld the contact arrangement ordered in its interim measure, allowing the applicant to maintain contact with his son on every second Saturday between 9 a.m. and 12   noon at the local child welfare service through supervised contact. It held that as the relationship between the applicant and his son had not improved during the proceedings, the court saw no other option than to order supervised access. The court based its judgment on the opinion of the child welfare service that the situation would take more time to resolve and until the child was helped to ease his anxieties about his father, it was not realistic to maintain contact outside the centre. The court also referred to the expert opinion of the psychologist finding no sign of alienation from the side of the applicant’s ex-partner. 15 .     The judgment was upheld by the Pécs High Court on 21 October 2020. The court found that the relationship between the child and the father had deteriorated, and the first instance court had been right to order supervised contact to rebuild and restore their relationship. In reply to the applicant’s claim that the first instance court had unfairly disregarded a sound record in which the applicant’s ex-partner had reviled the applicant to the child, the court argued that it cannot be concluded from one recording that the mother had regularly influenced the child against the applicant, an allegation which had not been supported by the expert opinion. 16.     The Constitutional Court dismissed the applicant’s constitutional complaint on 22 June 2021, finding that the applicant did not put forward any precisely defined grounds of unconstitutionality, either as regards the court procedure or as regards the merits of the decision, which would justify an in ‑ merit examination by the Constitutional Court. 17.     The applicant submitted that he had given up maintaining contact with his son following the first instance judgment. 18.     He complained under Article 8 of the Convention that the domestic courts had failed to take sufficient measures to prevent the loss of contact with his child by granting him access in a form that had been incapable to restore the connection between them and by disregarding his claims and evidence about parental alienation by the child’s mother. He also complained under Article 6 of the Convention about the length of the court proceedings and that the courts regulated his access to his son in violation of domestic law. THE COURT’S ASSESSMENT 19.     The Court reiterates that it is the master of the characterisation to be given in law to the facts of the case (see Guerra and Others v. Italy , 19   February 1998, § 44, Reports of Judgments and Decisions 1998‑I, and Radomilja and Others v. Croatia [GC], nos. 37685/10 and 22768/12, §§ 114 and 126, 20   March 2018). While Article 6 affords a procedural safeguard, namely the “right to court” in the determination of one’s “civil rights and obligations”, Article 8 serves the wider purpose of ensuring proper respect for, inter alia , family life. In this light, the decision-making process leading to measures of interference must be fair and such as to afford due respect to the interests safeguarded by Article 8 (see Diamante and Pelliccioni v.   San Marino , no.   32250/08, § 150, 27 September 2011, with further references). 20.     In the present case the Court considers that the complaint raised by the applicant under Article 6 is closely linked to his complaint under Article   8 and may accordingly be examined as part of the latter complaint (compare Diamante and Pelliccioni , cited above, § 151). 21.     The relevant principles in respect of proceedings concerning a parent’s contact with his or her child have been summarised in, among others, Ónodi v. Hungary (no. 38647/09, §§ 29-33, 30 May 2017), and T.C. v.   Italy (n o. 54032/18, §§ 57-58, 19 May 2022). 22.     The Court observes that the relationship between the applicant and his son comes within the sphere of family life under Article 8 of the Convention. In determining whether the domestic authorities fulfilled their positive obligation to duly protect the applicant’s right to respect for his family life, the Court considers that the decisive question in the present case is whether or not , the domestic authorities fulfilled their duty to take all possible measures to facilitate the enforcement of the contact arrangements until the final determination of the matter by the courts and whether the domestic courts fulfilled their duty to act swiftly and exercise exceptional diligence in deciding on the custody and contact arrangements. 23.     The Court notes that the applicant was granted contact and visiting rights from the very beginning of the court proceedings by virtue of the District Court’s decision of 26 September 2017 to approve the parties’ settlement (see paragraph 6 above). Until 15 July 2018 the applicant could exercise his contact rights on a regular basis: he could be with his son during every second weekend and for extended periods during school holidays. However, a fracture had undisputedly occurred in the applicant’s relationship with his son during or following the summer contact period in July 2018 which prevailed despite the efforts of the applicant and the child protection services. From the spring of 2019 the applicant and his ex-partner went through mediation and, as a result, agreed that the applicant was to have supervised contact with the help of the child protection services during the summer holidays of 2019. According to the contact logs made by the child protection service between July and August 2019, the applicant’s son tried to avoid talking to his father, was visibly anxious and reported bad experiences when the applicant took him during his visitation time. It transpires from the case file that the child protection service had continuously offered its support to re-establish meaningful contact between the applicant and his son and had consulted the parties as to how to ensure the sustainability of contact. However, the child protection service’s efforts were in vain. 24.     The applicant complained that domestic courts had granted him supervised contact despite its alleged inoperability. The Court observes, however, that the domestic courts, in their decisions, struck a balance between the competing interests and complied with their duty to consider the best interests of the child, while not losing sight of the applicant’s rights as a parent to maintain contact with his child. The courts took into account several factors when considering what would be in the best interests of the child concerning the contact arrangement: he had been in the care of his mother since birth, suffered from Asperger syndrome and activity and attention deficit disorder, had bad memories of earlier occasions when his father had taken him away, his anxiety did not ease during the supervised contact held with the support of professionals and in the opinion of the professionals of the child welfare service more time was needed to resolve the conflict situation and to rebuild the relationship between the father and his son. In the light of these elements, the domestic courts concluded that the contact demanded by the applicant, involving the removal of the child, could not be ordered at that stage. The District Court, in particular, had to react to a situation where the applicant’s son – who was eleven and twelve years old at the material time – refused to maintain contact with the applicant as per the agreement of the parents. The arrangement ordered in the interim measure and later in the judgment was intended to assist the parties in re-establishing contact between the applicant and his son, proposing a gradual approach to extending the applicant’s right of contact (see paragraph 11 above). 25.     In light of the above, the Court is satisfied that the national authorities took all the necessary steps to facilitate contact and the recovery of the relationship between the applicant and his son that could reasonably have been expected in view of the delicate, conflict-ridden dynamics between the applicant and his son. 26.     As to the fairness of the decision-making process and notably the alleged protraction of the domestic courts’ proceedings the Court notes that the proceedings took some four years and three months on three levels of jurisdiction (from 9 March 2017 to 22 June 2021). Even though the first instance proceedings lasted for some three years and two months, the Court notes that numerous procedural steps have been taken during this period, including the commission of an expert opinion, the hearing of witnesses and the expert and the adjudication of several interim measure requests submitted by both parties (see paragraphs 11-12 above). The applicant has not pointed to any significant periods of inactivity by the first instance court. Furthermore, the applicant was granted contact with his son from the outset of the proceedings before the District Court. Subsequently, various aspects of the contact arrangements had to be modified during the court proceedings with the aim of allowing the applicant to access his son, in light of the changing dynamics in their relationship. The applicant has not at all demonstrated how the length of the proceedings before the District Court could have had irremediable consequences on his relationship with his son. Therefore, even though the proceedings were lengthy, there is no indication that the applicant’s relationship with his son was determined by the mere passage of time. As for the applicant’s complaint that the domestic courts disregarded his evidence about parental alienation by the child’s mother in the proceedings, the Court observes that the High Court expressly addressed this argument and endorsed the findings of the psychological expert that the applicant’s allegation in this regard had not been proven (see paragraph 15 above). The Court thus accepts that the domestic courts have dealt with the proceedings with the requisite diligence and overall struck a fair balance between the competing interests, as required by Article 8. 27.     Accordingly, the application is manifestly ill-founded within the meaning of Article   35 §   3 (a) and must be rejected in accordance with Article   35 §   4 of the Convention. For these reasons, the Court, unanimously, Declares the application inadmissible. Done in English and notified in writing on 2 October 2025.     Dorothee von Arnim   Oddný Mjöll Arnardóttir   Deputy Registrar   President