Valitusluvasta ja yksilöllisen oikeusturvan toteutumisesta hallintoprosessissa
Avainsanat:
hallintolainkäyttö, oikeudenkäynti, oikeusturva, muutoksenhaku, valituslupaAbstrakti
Leave to appeal and individual due process rights in administrative court procedure
One can appeal the legality of administrative decisions before the administrative courts. Nowadays, with few exceptions, challenging the decisions of administrative courts requires that leave to appeal is granted by the Supreme Administrative Court. Leave will be granted in case of precedent, in case of manifest error, or in case of other serious grounds. A manifest error having occurred is the crucial ground from the perspective of individual due process rights.
The requirement for an error to be “manifest” may result in the bar for obtaining leave to appeal being raised rather high. This, in turn, can result in an individual being denied his or her due process rights, if the decision of the administrative court would in closer judicial examination turn out to be incorrect, but the error has not been sufficiently “manifest”. The author argues that leave to appeal on the grounds of manifest error should be interpreted more as the outcome of the administrative court decision being incorrect, and not as a high bar for re-examining decisions with an incorrect outcome.
Given that judicial redress is mostly, and even solely, provided by the administrative courts of first instance, the cases must be handled properly. A particular focus should be on ensuring that all the judicially relevant facts have been presented and can be established with sufficient certainty. This seems to be achieved in varying degrees in court practice. As a judicial system with a leave-to-appeal procedure is better suited for assessing questions of law rather than questions of fact, establishing judicially relevant facts properly in the first instance also provides a better opportunity to focus the work of the Supreme Administrative Court without jeopardising individual due process rights.
