## Facts

- A landlord owned and lived in a two-apartment building and leased the upstairs apartment to an unrelated residential tenant under a standard lease.
- The landlord terminated the lease to make the unit available for her son to move in and provide care, invoking landlord “own use” as the basis for termination.
- The tenant refused to vacate, asserting a constitutionally protected right to occupy the dwelling and arguing eviction would be disproportionate.
- A local trial court and an intermediate appellate court granted the landlord eviction.
- The tenant filed a constitutional complaint challenging the eviction judgments as violating constitutional protections for property and the home.

## Issues

1. Whether a tenant’s legally secured right to possess and occupy a leased dwelling constitutes “property” protected by constitutional property guarantees.
2. If the tenant’s occupancy interest is protected property, whether the civil courts failed to properly account for and balance that interest when granting eviction for landlord’s own use.
3. Whether constitutional protection of the home is directly implicated by a landlord’s private-law eviction action, or instead only operates indirectly as a value affecting interpretation of private law.
4. What level of constitutional review applies to civil-court judgments applying ordinary landlord–tenant law.

## Decision

- The constitutional court rejected the tenant’s constitutional complaint and left the eviction judgments in place.
- The court held that a tenant’s right of possession and occupancy in a rented dwelling is “property” within the meaning of the constitutional property guarantee.
- The court concluded the civil courts did not violate the tenant’s constitutional property protection because their application of termination-for-own-use rules stayed within permissible constitutional balancing.
- The court held that constitutional protection of the home must be considered when interpreting private-law rules, but its direct protective scope is not triggered by a landlord’s eviction suit against a tenant.
- The court reiterated it is not a further appellate instance on ordinary-law questions; it reviews only whether constitutional dimensions were recognized and constitutional balancing boundaries were respected.

## Legal Principles

- A tenant’s legally secured right to possess and occupy leased residential premises qualifies as constitutionally protected “property,” even though it arises from private law rather than ownership of the real estate.
- Constitutional property protection covers certain durable private-law entitlements to use and benefit from an object, as structured and safeguarded by the legal order.
- Competing property interests of landlord and tenant must be balanced; constitutional property guarantees permit legislative and judicial shaping of property relations, including limits reflecting social obligations.
- In reviewing civil judgments, constitutional review is limited to whether the courts identified the relevant constitutional interests and applied a constitutionally acceptable balancing approach; it does not correct ordinary-law errors as such.
- Constitutional protection of the home informs interpretation and application of private-law rules affecting residential occupancy, but a private landlord’s eviction action does not directly constitute a violation of that home guarantee.

## Conclusion

The court recognized leasehold occupancy as constitutionally protected property but upheld eviction granted for landlord’s own use, finding no constitutional defect in the civil courts’ balancing and treating home protection as an interpretive consideration rather than a direct bar to private eviction litigation.


Tenant’s Right of Occupancy Case (Besitzrecht des Mieters), 89 BVerfGE 1 (Bundesverfassungsgericht 1993)