A couple in Italy who complained that their neighbors' loud toilet was "intolerable" have finally won their 19-year-old court battle.
Italy's supreme court cited rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in favor of the couple after their neighbors' toilet kept them awake at night. The sound of flushing “aggravated by frequent night use” compromised the couple's quality of life and violated their right to the free exercise of daily habits, the appellate judge said, according to Il Giornale.
The ordeal began in 2003 when the couple was living in an apartment near La Spezia.
A lower court had previously ruled against them, so they took the case to an appeals court in the northern city of Genoa. That court investigated as to why the toilet was so loud, and determined it was because the four brothers who owned the neighboring apartment embedded the water tank in a nine-inch wall not far from the couple’s headboard, per the Times of London.
Luckily for the couple, the supreme court showed sympathy towards the sleeping distraction.
The court ruled that the brothers would have to move the water tank and pay the couple about $565 for every year since it has caused an issue, bringing the total to about $10,760.
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The brothers tried to get an Italian supreme court to intervene, but that panel ruled against them too. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the “right to respect for one’s private and family life,” according to Il Giornale.
The loud flushing during the night that interfered with the couple's sleep violated the Italian constitution’s right to health, the court added, per the Times of London.
The 19-year-old case was not a record for duration in Italy, it did highlight the country's legal system issues. Francesco Parisi, co-author of “The Italian Legal System: An Introduction,” said that every claim that is put in front of the supreme court must be heard and get a decision. High courts do not have the freedom to choose their cases like they do in the United States.
“This creates a bottleneck in the decision-making process — three levels of adjudication, instead of two, with a single court for the entire nation,” Parisi, who's also a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said.
Journalist Massimiliano Parente wrote in Il Giornale that the toilet case is a prime example of Italy's slow legal system.
“If Franz Kafka had been an Italian citizen of today he would not have written ’The Trial,’ he would have written ‘The Toilet’ to describe justice in our country,” Parente said.
“At the judicial level,” Parente added, “we are a big, huge, gigantic clogged toilet.”
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