Compensation for the Bereaved After a Person Is Killed

A change in compensating so-called secondary victims

The Constitutional Court has recently made an important ruling that fundamentally changes the approach to compensating secondary victims. Secondary victims are the relatives left behind after a person is killed. This case concerns a sad, but unfortunately typical, situation in which a grandmother's grandchildren and daughter-in-law died in a road accident caused by another driver. Although the grandmother was not directly involved in the accident, the death of her loved ones affected her deeply. She began to suffer from severe depression and, as a result, ended up on a disability pension.

The bereaved person's claims

The grandmother sued the at-fault driver's insurer for compensation for the harm she herself had suffered. In this context, she had the following claims:

Compensation for so-called emotional harm: monetary satisfaction for being unable to form, develop, and maintain a relationship with the loved ones who died.
Compensation connected with the harm to her health: compensation for loss of earnings during her incapacity for work, compensation for loss of earnings due to disability, and compensation for the costs of her medical treatment.

A significant ruling

The significant shift in the current case law lay in the following. The Constitutional Court recognised that a relative of the deceased has the right to compensation for harm to health arising from grief (or shock) at the death of their loved ones, along with the claims connected to it. This decision changes the previous case law and broadens the compensation available to injured persons.

Further claims of the bereaved

A person in a similar situation may also have other pecuniary and non-pecuniary claims connected with the harm to their health, such as:

Compensation for pain and suffering (that is, compensation for a temporary painful psychological state suffered as a result of the shock of a loved one's death, in particular depression or PTSD);
Compensation for unpaid work (where the person who was killed had previously done unpaid work for the bereaved person);
Compensation for loss of pension (the difference between the pension the injured person became entitled to and the pension they would have been entitled to if the compensation for loss of earnings after the end of their incapacity for work, which they were receiving during the period relevant for calculating the pension, had been included in the base from which the pension was calculated);
Compensation for the cost of maintaining surviving dependants (the cost of maintaining those dependants whom the deceased was supporting, or was obliged to support, as at the date of their death).

We have long worked with compensation for personal injury, and we welcome this decision of the Constitutional Court as the right one. No one can bring the bereaved their loved ones back, but they can now claim broader financial compensation, which may help ease their difficult situation.

(based on the Constitutional Court judgment Pl. ÚS 14/24)