ABSTRACT
The Court was confronted with a dispute concerning the exact course of the proceedings in the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal and had to reach its decision on the basis of the available evidence. The documents produced by the applicant did not provide sufficient prima facie evidence of the accuracy of his version of events. In addition, the record of the hearing, which was produced for the first time before the Court, constituted a significant element in support of the opinion that judgment was reserved at the conclusion of the hearing on 9 November 1984; in principle, that ruled out the possibility of a further hearing. There was nothing to show that in the course of the sole hearing the parties confined themselves to expanding upon their submissions concerning the stay of the proceedings. On the contrary, the Court of Appeal’s judgment gave the impression that the trustee’s lawyer presented argument on the merits. One of the grounds of the judgment indicated that, contrary to the applicant’s claims, the relevant documents were in fact filed in the proceedings before the appeal court. Having regard to those considerations, the Court could not find a violation of A 6. The Commission based its request for revision on two documents to which the applicant did not secure access until after the delivery of the judgment of 20 September 1993. The admissibility of any request for revision of a judgment of the Court was subject to strict scrutiny. The two documents related to the hearing in the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal. One of them was a letter which the applicant had not been able to produce, a fact to which express reference was made in the judgment of 20 September 1993. In those circumstances, the Court could not exclude the possibility that the documents in question ‘might by [their] nature have a decisive influence’. The Commission’s request was accordingly admissible. The Court had to determine whether the documents cast doubt on the conclusions it reached in 1993; it had to establish whether the two documents in question provided sufficient prima facie evidence in support of the applicant’s version of events. After reviewing the evidence, the Court concluded that the documents on which the Commission based its request would not have had a decisive influence on the judgment of 20 September 1993 and did not constitute grounds for revision. The letter referred to had been merely a covering letter. Of the list of documents, the Court had had regard to those concerning the course of the domestic proceedings in the original
judgment, the other documents in the appeal file did not provide any information on the course of the domestic proceedings. The Commission’s request was accordingly unfounded.
