Licensees and lodgers evictions in Cyprus

General questions & discussions on Cyprus property related matters
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JMot
Posts: 14
Joined: 03 Dec 2020 15:56

Licensees and lodgers evictions in Cyprus

Post by JMot »

I answer here to a post I made in December 2020, since I found the answer to my original question.

It was confirmed by my solicitor that there is no law in Cyprus that regulates licenses on immovable properties (a lodger would be considered a licensee) the conditions written in the contract (or worse verbally agreed) are valid and can be enforced by the landlord peacefully without recurring to the (very slow) Cyprus courts.

I went through Cyprus case law (since there is no answer to my question in statute) and found the following 2004 judgement of the Cyprus Supreme Court which refers to English Common Law:
http://www.cylaw.org/cgi-bin/open.pl?fi ... 1_1167.htm

So as long as the eviction of a licensee (without recourse to court) is peaceful and the termination notice in the license contract has expired, the licensee (lodger) has no right to damages, which is very similar to English law with so called peaceful re-entry when the licensee is not present.

These are the important parts of the judgement (part in the original English and part translated from Greek):

"Related to this issue of expulsion of an illegal property owner, without the help of the court, is what is mentioned in the English book Clerk & Lindsell on Torts 16th edition, paragraphs 23-23 p. 1320, where we read the following:

«23-23 Forcible expulsion by owner who has entered peaceably. If a person entitled to the possession of premises can manage to get in without committing a forcible entry, even though he does so by means of an artifice, he may then justify using force to defend his possession so acquired without rendering himself liable even to a criminal prosecution. He may justify forcible expelling a trespasser, and it makes no difference that the trespasser was on the premises before the owner. An expulsion, after a peaceable entry by a party having title, does not make the entry forcible. The party so entering, however, must be careful to request the other to depart before he can justify laying hands on him to turn him out, and in no case must he use more force than the occasion requires; for any violence in excess of what is reasonably necessary to effect the expulsion the owner will be liable. "

In our free translation the above are as follows:

"23-23 Expulsion by the owner who entered peacefully. If a person entitled to take possession of a property can enter it without committing a violent entry, even if he does so by trickery, he will then be able to and justify the use of force to defend the occupation he thus managed to regain, without making himself responsible even in criminal prosecution. He will be able to justify the violent eviction of the operation and it does not matter if the intervention was on the premises before the owner. An expulsion after a peaceful entry by the property owner does not make the entry violent. But the person entering in this way must be careful to ask the other party to leave before reaching out to expel him and in no case should he use more force than is required by the case. . as any violence beyond what is reasonably necessary to achieve the eviction makes the owner responsible. "

In the case of Bristol Corporation v. Ross & Another [1973] 3 All ER. 393 , which refers to the above excerpt from the Kennedy Hotels Ltd. case .the trespassers were squatters, that is, purely illegal. However, the owner requested legal restitution, which he succeeded in, but the interventions requested the suspension of the eviction decree. Lord Denning MR stated, inter alia, that the courts of the Commonwealth never suspended decrees in those cases where the owner had the right to take immediate possession without going to court. Therefore the owner would not be put in a worse position because he came to court. Regarding the treatment of self-help (the remedy of self-help) is what is mentioned on page 396 of the case Bristol Corporation(above), the essence of which is that although a citizen has the right to regain possession of the property (where a person clearly owns it illegally) without the help of the court and given that he can do so peacefully, it is nevertheless advisable as it does so through a court. At the same time, however, the courts must ensure that this right is secured soon.

In our case, although the parties differed as to how the appellants entered the premises (the plaintiff allegedly broke the locks and cut off electricity and water, while the defendants allegedly simply opened them with their own key which rightfully the court of first instance limited itself to saying that the defendants "took the law into their own hands and violated not only the rightsof the plaintiff but also that of the legal order ". Nothing mentions the manner of intervention, although from the point of view of the credibility of the witnesses he accepted the witnesses of the defendants as philanthropic witnesses and unreliable the plaintiff and his wife. The witnesses of the defendants, who were considered credible by the court of first instance, had stated that they opened with their own key, recorded the objects that were there and belonged to the plaintiff and carefully transported them to another place (warehouse) of the hotel without causing any damage. which was accepted by the court of first instance.


As a result, the appeal succeeds. The first instance decision as well as the order for costs are set aside.
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