Shutters down in Liechtenstein

I have reported about the decision 4A_18/2017 of the Swiss Supreme Court (Utz ./. Hilti) on this Blog here.  It is an interesting decision for various reasons, but the factual setup is just not fully clear from the Supreme Court decision itself. I thus tried to obtain the underlying decision of the Princely High Court of the Principality of Liechtenstein, to gain further insight. I felt this should not be an issue nowadays.

Oh, how mistaken I was! The Princely High Court just put the shutters down.

Coats of Arms (LI)
Coats of Arms (LI)

I was informed that a formal request of file inspection would be required to obtain a copy of the decision. Practically, this will just not work: The parties involved need to consent (how would you ever get consent from six parties which are anonymised in the Supreme Court decision?), or one would have to have a legal interest (which obviously does not apply).

I could not even obtain an anonymised version of the decision (I did not expect more than that anyway):

Sending the anonymised decision to a foreign country is out of the question.

Eh? The ‘foreign country’ is the seat of the competent second instance court in this matter.

As a last resort, I suggested that the decision be published ex officio in the database gerichtsentscheide.li. However, only ‘selected’ decisions are included in this database. For some reason this decision is apparently not worth being selected.

Frankly, I have difficulties to accept that this is still happening nowadays. Just for the sake of comparison, note what the Swiss Supreme Court has decided in a recent case in relation to the public access to judicial decisions.

Reported by Martin WILMING

(Header image by Asurnipal under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license)

A VIEW OF THE SWISS SUPREME COURT

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