European Property Rights and Wrongs - Diana Wallis MEP

use law is regionalised and so the specifics in each regional community would
need to be considered. 2) The result might have been different if the civil law
had allowed private individuals to obtain title to public land by adverse possession;
private beaches exist in England in tightly controlled circumstances. 3) In the
French case the authorities had made very clear throughout that the occupation
was by licence of the state, and a different result might have arisen if the public
authorities had by negligence (or possibly even by tolerance) had created a legitimate
expectation that the home owner would be able to continue in possession,
that is the authorities contributed to maintaining uncertainty regarding the legal
status of the property. 4) Public authorities must act in the public interest and if
the abuses sometimes alleged in Spain could be made good in court this would
invalidate the decision making process. 5) Public authorities must also act consistently
between neighbours and consider circumstances such as the outstanding
architectural merit of the building. 6) The decision to enforce demolition of the
Depalles’ house was treated as a control on the use of property with the consequences
that compensation was not required; there may be exceptional cases
where compensation is required when the use of property is controlled and other
cases where the facts are properly analysed as a de facto expropriation requiring
compensation at the market value (perhaps when a house is bulldozed without
legal preliminaries). 7) Finally, although Depalle is tough, it may be possible to
imagine a yet more extreme case in which the burden imposed on the individual
owner is even more excessive, upsetting even further the balance between the
interests of the community and those of the applicant (para. 92).
So, in general challenges to the demolition of properties infringing coastal
zoning rules are unlikely to succeed, but there is scope for a successful challenge
in individual cases demonstrating extreme facts. One way and another it does
superficially seem surprising that none of the Spanish ‘land grab’ cases has been
arguable on any of these grounds. l
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