Fundamental Rights Section 2.3.4 Court proceedings (VA BD/43-J/06, BMJ-A909.825/0003-III 5/2006) In January 2006, N.N. filed a complaint regarding the long duration of proceedings by the Wiener Neustadt District Court. Two cases, which were joined in the hearing of September 3, 2001 for the purposes of the procedure and of judgment, dealt with the complaints for damages for pain and suffering lodged by the complainants on 25 June 2001 as a result of a traffic accident. The proceedings in the first legal process, until the hearing with conclusion of the proceedings on March 20, 2003, was characterised by the obtaining of several expert opinions, whereby this resulted in delays, in that the experts appointed by the court requested postponement due to overwork/returned the file without an opinion. It came to a further delay in the proceedings, because after the conclusion of the hearing on March 20, 2003, the judgement was only prepared with a date of July 28, 2003, in contravention of the standardised period of four weeks in Sect. 415 Zivilprozessordnung (ZPO - Code of Civil Procedure). After the plaintiffs had lodged an appeal against the judgment and an appeal against the costs order on September 22, 2003 and after the defendant had lodged a reply to the plaintiffs' appeal against the judgment and their appeal against the costs order on October 22, 2003, the file was not submitted to the responsible Wiener Neustadt Regional Court, but submitted to the Lower Austrian Local Health Insurance Fund for inspection purposes in February 2004. Only after the joint application of the parties dated January 21, 2005, to submit the file for decision to the Wiener Neustadt Regional Court, on March 7, 2005 the case was finally – after a standstill in the proceedings of one year and four-and-a-half months after the reply of October 22, 2003 – submitted to the Wiener Neustadt Regional Court. Why the file was not submitted to the appellate court earlier is – as the Federal Minister of Justice stated in her comment – inexplicable. Because the file was with the judge and did not appear in audit lists of the electronic register as being open, after preparation of the judgement, these proceedings were not apparent to supervisory bodies. Already with a decision dated March 30, 2005, the Wiener Neustadt Regional Court agreed to the appeal, rescinded the judgement of the Wiener Neustadt District Court (partially) and referred the case back to the court of first instance hearing the case for a new judgement. 40