The Czech Constitutional Court has rejected a complaint by the Liechtenstein family in the dispute over the family’s former property in southern Moravia, including the Lednice-Valtice chateaus, its spokeswoman Kamila Abbasi told CTK.
The claim on the property, which is now owned by the Czech state, was brought by the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation. It was unsuccessful at the District Court in Breclav, the Regional Court in Brno and the Czech Supreme Court.
The Constitutional court ruled in a brief order, finding the complaint clearly unfounded.
The Foundation filed lawsuits with 26 Czech district courts at the end of 2018, one of which was the court in Breclav. In the lawsuits, it pointed out that the last holder of family estates on Czech territory, Franz Joseph II, was not a citizen of Germany but of neutral Liechtenstein, and moreover, the head of a sovereign state. According to the Foundation, the confiscation of the property was therefore illegal.
However, after the Second World War, Czechoslovak authorities assumed that the Prince of Liechtenstein had declared his German nationality in the 1930s, and therefore his property was forfeited to the state on the basis of the post-war decrees issued by President Edvard Benes.
The Foundation has turned repeatedly to the Czech Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court in individual disputes, so far without success.
Last April, the Constitutional Court rejected a complaint about land on the southeastern outskirts of Prague. According to the majority opinion of the Constitutional Court judges, the family’s property was subject to post-war confiscation decrees. The decisions of the administrative authorities of that time cannot be reviewed by the present courts. An exception to the rule is provided by the restitution regulations, but these do not apply to the Liechtensteins, as they lost their property before the onset of communist totalitarianism in 1948.
In a series of other recent rulings, the Constitutional Court rejected complaints concerning property in the Usti nad Orlici, Brno, Bruntal and Olomouc districts. In its current ruling, the court pointed out that the reasoning of the complaints was repetitive, and its decision was therefore unchanged.
The dispute over the property in southern Moravia is exceptional as it also concerns the Lednice-Valtice area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Among the 14 state institutions that faced the lawsuit in the Breclav court were the Lesy CR Czech state forestry company, the National Heritage Institute, the Morava River Basin and the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency.
The Liechtensteins previously filed an interstate complaint against the Czech Republic with the European Court of Human Rights. In 2023, the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation stated that it was prepared to relinquish its ownership claims to the property in the Czech Republic in exchange for the creation of a common fund to which the ownership rights to the disputed property would be transferred. In such a case, the Prince’s Foundation would be entrusted with the obligation to manage the assets in the fund in a responsible and sustainable manner.
