The Portuguese state has paid compensation of over €1 million as requested by the European Court of Human Rights for "moral damages" to 217 victims of slow justice.
"The State, through the Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance, paid compensation on the 3rd of October 2013," according to an embarrassed Ministry of Justice.
In April, the Portuguese State was fined €1.087 million by the Strasbourg Court over delays in a case involving the bankruptcy of a hotel back in 1996. The 217 plaintiffs, including foreigners, claimed refunds of more than €11 million as creditors to the business.
Some of the plaintiffs are now over 80-years old. They started the lawsuits against the company that owned the former Hotel Neptuno in Monte Gordo, Vila Real de Santo Antonio, Algarve, at the end of the 1980s having entered into contracts for the acquisition of timeshare apartments.
In the decision to allocated compensation, the Strasbourg judges recognised that the process has some complexity, but said that nothing justifies a slowness that it considered "excessive" and outside the "reasonable period" imposed by the Convention on Human Rights .
