The modern doctrine of property law in Ukraine shall be reconsidered from the perspective of understanding the right to property as.

The purpose of the article is (a) to outline the approach of the European Court of Human Rights to addressing applications under Article 1 of Protocol № 1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and (b) to analyse the horizontal effect of the right peaceful enjoyment of property.

While deciding on the applications pertaining to protection of property, the ECtHR utilizes a sophisticated algorithm comprising a sequence of yes-or-no questions, where the transition to each subsequent question is preconditioned by affirmative answer to the previous one: (1) Was there any property rights? (2) Has there been an interference with property rights? (3) Was the interference lawful? (4) Did the intervention have a legitimate aim? (5) Was the interference proportionate to the aim pursued?

According to this algorithm, if the answer to the first four questions is “yes” and to the last, fifth, is “no”, the ECtHR finds that the respondent State has violated applicant’s right to peaceful enjoyment of property. In all other cases there is no violation.

If, within the jurisdiction of the State, an individual may infringe the property rights of another without any liability for the former and any remedy for the latter, the Statemay be reasonably blamed for it, since the situation may indicate that either there is no legislation prohibiting the infringement, or the cases of infringement are not investigated or the courts do not properly apply the provisions of the respective legislation. Correcting these defects of “State’s work” certainly has an impact on horizontal relations and is perceived by private persons in their relations with each other.

Tectonic shift in the national doctrine of property rights manifests itself in the new perspective on property: the property is no longer seen as either an exclusively civil or an exclusively national legal institution. Like a number of other private law institutions, property is being constitutionalized. Any dispute over property rights receives a new perspective in terms of fundamental human rights. And it is true not only with regard to vertical relations of individual vis-à-vis public authority, but also with regard to relations of private persons between themselves (horizontal). The horizontal effect of human rights is achieved through the concept of positive obligations of the state being applied by the Supreme Court and by the implementation of the proportionality test in domestic jurisprudence.