FIRST SECTION

DECISION

AS TO THE ADMISSIBILITY OF

Application no. 53367/99 by Snejana Avramova STOYANOVA and Kosta Kanchev IVANOV against Bulgaria

The European Court of Human Rights (First Section), sitting on 12 May 2005 as a Chamber composed of:

Mr C.L. Rozakis , President , Mr L. Loucaides , Mrs F. Tulkens , Mr P. Lorenzen , Mrs N. Vajić , Mrs S. Botoucharova , Mr D. Spielmann , judges , and Mr S . Nielsen , R egistrar ,

Having regard to the above application lodged on 12 November 1999 ,

Having regard to the observations submitted by the respondent Government and the observations in reply submitted by the applicants ,

Having deliberated, decides as follows:

THE FACTS

The applicants, Mrs Snejana Avramova Stoyanova and her husband Mr Kosta Kanchev Ivanov, are Bulgarian nationals, who were born in 1927 and 1926 respectively and live in Sofia . They we re represented before the Court by Mrs Z. Kalaidjieva, a lawyer practising in Sofia .

The respondent Government were represented by their agent Mrs M. Dimova , of the Ministry of Justice.

The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.

A. The particular circumstances of the applicants ' case

By virtue of section 7 of the Restitution Law and through judicial decision of 1999 the applicants ' title to their apartment (in which the first applicant ' s mother and then her family had lived since the mid-1950s and had purchased it from the local municipality in 1971) was declared null and void. Ownership thereof was bestowed back to the heirs of the person from whom the apartment had been nationalised in 1949.

Since the mid-1950s the first applicant ' s mother as well as other members of the family, including the first applicant and later her husband, the second applicant, were tenants in a state-owned five-room 197 square metres apartment in Sofia . In 1971 the applicants and the first applicant ' s mother purchased the apartment and reimbursed the price within several years. Upon the first applicant ' s mother ' s death the applicants became the joint owners of the apartment.

In 1992 the pre-nationalisation owner of the apartment brought an action against the applicants under section 7 of the Restitution Law. Upon her death, the proceedings were continued by her heirs.

On 15 September 1994 the District Court dismissed the claim, noting that at the relevant time the applicants ' family had consisted of five persons which entitled them to a three-room apartment, that the first applicant, who was a researcher in philosophy, was entitled to an additional room for her study, and that the apartment consisted in fact of four rooms, the fifth room being a connecting hall. The court further noted that the first applicant ' s mother had been registered as an “anti-fascist and anti-capitalist veteran” - a registration that had carried a number of privileges provided by law - and that this fact had been mentioned in the papers relating to the 1971 purchase. However, at the relevant time the right of a registered veteran to purchase a dwelling with priority was provided for by law. Therefore, it could not be considered that there had been abuse of office or of a position in the communist party within the meaning of section 7 of the Restitution Law.

Following a decision terminating the proceedings and another decision ordering their continuation, the plaintiffs ' ensuing appeal was eventually decided by the Sofia City Court by judgment of 6 April 1998 which upheld the District Court ' s judgment.

Upon the plaintiff ' s cassation appeal, on 16 June 1999 the Supreme Court of Cassation quashed the lower courts ' judgments and granted the claim, declaring the applicants ' title null and void.

The Supreme Court of Cassation agreed with the lower courts that there had not been abuse. However, the conclusions as regards the fifth room of the apartment had been wrong. In reality, the apartment had exceeded by one room the family ' s needs, as determined by the relevant regulations.

On 30 June 1999 the restored owners invited the applicants to vacate the apartment and requested monthly payments of 500 US dollars.

The applicants refused to leave but were eventually evicted in June 2002 pursuant to an eviction court order.

Between 1999 and 2002 the restored owners sued the applicants and obtained judgments ordering them to pay damages for their failure to vacate the property. Thus, as of October 2003 the applicants owed to the restored owners approximately BGN 28,000 (the equivalent of approximately EUR 14,0 00) which they refused to pay. The applicants also owed at least BGN 3,000 in costs.

The applicants never applied for compensation bonds considering that “useless”.

On 19 October 1999 the applicants requested the mayor to provide them a municipal apartment for rent. They were placed on the waiting list but never received an offer.

On an unspecified date the applicants purchased a small apartment for an unspecified sum of money and moved there. Shortly thereafter , the restored owners applied for and obtained an attachment of the applicants ' new apartment to secure the payment of their claims. On 8 April 2005 the enforcement judge undertook steps to put the applicants ' new apartment on sale with a view to satisfying the restored owners ' claims. In addition, monthly deductions are applied to the applicants ' pensions to cover their debt.

B. Background facts and relevant domestic law and practice

These are summarised in application n o. 43278/98, Velikov and Others v. Bulgaria .

COMPLAINTS

The applicants complain ed, relying on Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention and on Article 14 that they ha d been the victims of an unlawful and unjustified interference with their property rights.

THE LAW

The applicants complained , relying on under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention and on Article 14, that they had been the victims of an unlawful and unjustified interference with their property rights . The relevant provisions read as follows:

Article 1 of Protocol No. 1

“Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law.

The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a State to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties.”

Article 14

“The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in [the] Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.”

The Government ' s submissions

The Government stated that the legislation on the restitution of nationalised property pursued important legitimate aims in the public interest: providing justice and moral satisfaction for all those whose property had been nationalised without compensation in the past and launching the foundations of a modern social and economic system, based on democracy and a market economy. In choosing the means to achieve those aims, the national authorities enjoyed a wide margin of appreciation in accordance with Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention.

The Government maintained that the restitution laws were sufficiently clear. They provided for judicial exam ination of disputes between pre ‑ nationalisation owners and those who had purchased the nationalised property from the State. The applicants ' case had been dealt with by three levels of jurisdiction. Thus, the conclusion that they had bought the apartment in breach of the law had been reached on the basis of the examination of all pertinent evidence in accordance with the applicable rules of evidence.

Citing the Constitutional Court (judgment No. 1 of 18 January 1996 in case no. 29/1995), the Government emphasised that nullity was an adequate sanction in respect of transactions concluded in breach of the law. Any other solution would run contrary to the principles of legal certainty and the rule of law.

The Government also considered that the relevant law and practice had not imposed on the applicants an excessive burden and had not violated the principle of proportionality.

In particular, in the Government ' s view, persons ordered to vacate their apartments under section 7 of the Restitution Law had the possibility to rent a municipal apartment at low rates or to obtain a rent allowance, if they had insufficient means to pay market rental prices. For a certain period of time there had also been a possibility to obtain compensation in cash at market prices. Since 2000, compensation by bonds was available. State policy priorities and the availability of State resources during the relevant period had necessitated resort to several different compensation methods and the corresponding legislative amendments.

As regards the compensation bonds, the Government stated that they could be traded in accordance with the relevant stock exchange rules. Furthermore, the law provided that persons in the applicants ' position had priority in purchasing State and municipal dwellings.

The Government also referred to the fact that in accordance with the relevant law and practice the pre-nationalisation owners could not claim compensation for damage or changes in the property since the nationalisation in the 1940s and the post-nationalisation owners could not claim compensation for improvements. In the Government ' s view, this solution demonstrated that a just balance had been struck between all interests involved.

In sum, the Government considered that the restitution legislation was based on the principles of the rule of law, justice and equality before the law. It struck a balance between the interests of those whose property had been confiscated without compensation in the past and the persons who had lost cases brought against them under section 7 of the Restitution Law. Therefore, as the former Commission found in the case of Panikian v. Bulgaria (cited above), the national authorities had not acted beyond their margin of appreciation.

On that basis the Government invited the Court to reject the application as being manifestly ill-founded.

The applicants ' submissions in reply

The applicants criticised the Government ' s observations as being of a general nature, without an analysis in concreto of the legal and practical issues in their case. The applicants stated that they did not wish to call into question the entire restitution process in Bulgaria since 1989 but complained of concrete deprivations of property.

The applicants submitted that they had enjoyed several decades of undisturbed possession, paid property tax and maintained and improved an apartment which they had bought from the State. They had never had any reason to doubt the lawfulness of the transaction and had been owners in good faith. However, in order to correct an injustice committed in the past, in 1992 and the following years the State had committed another injustice.

The applicants submitted that while the restitution of State owned property had been in the public interest and thus pursued a legitimate aim, the same could not be said of section 7 of the Restitution Law, which sought to satisfy the restitution claims of certain individuals by depriving other individuals of their property.

The applicants further maintained that the deprivation of property they had suffered had not been “prescribed by law” as the applicable law opened the door to arbitrariness. According to the applicants, the initial idea underlying section 7 of the Restitution Law had been to sanction those who had obtained property by abusing their position of power during the communist past. However, the open-ended language of section 7 and its interpretation by the courts had resulted in depriving individuals of their property for nothing more than a trivial administrative omission on the part of municipal clerks.

In particular, by allowing the nullification of titles to property for any breach of the law, without distinction between material breaches and trivial ones, section 7 had set the scene for heated judicial battles over details in transactions dating from decades ago. In the applicants ' view, the large majority of real estate transactions effected in Bulgaria in the recent past involved omissions of some nature. Instead of taking into account the practice of the municipalities at the relevant time, the open-ended language of section 7 and its judicial interpretation had led to a situation where any transaction dating from the recent past m ight at any time be nullified. In the applicants ' view section 7 and the judicial practice applying it did not meet the Convention requirements of clarity and foreseeability of the law. Moreover, the impugned law and practice ran contrary to a number of essential legal principles embedded in Bulgarian law such as the prohibition against retrospective application of the law and the provisions on acquisitive prescription for undisturbed possession in good faith.

As to the proportionality of the interference with their property rights the applicants stated that there was a clear imbalance in that they were only entitled to partial compensation. Initially the law did not provide for any possibility for compensation. Although in 1996 the law was amended and provided for full compensation in cash, the Government never paid it and in 2000 Parliament abolished the relevant provisions for the sole reason that the State did not have sufficient resources to pay. The applicants stressed that that constituted a retroactive deprivation of possessions, as they had already acquired pecuniary claims to full compensation in cash.

The applicants further stated that compensation by bonds was inadequate and clearly insufficient in view of the time-consuming procedure and the fact that the amount that could be obtained did not exceed 15 – 20 % of the value of the apartment. Moreover, the applicants were not entitled to compensation for the improvements they had made in the property and owed damages for having used their own apartment after 1992.

The applicants also alleged that the relevant law and practice violated the principle of equality as they favoured the pre-nationalisation owners and were not based on a considered attempt to strike a fair balance. In particular, the Constitutional Court never took into account the burden placed on the post-nationalisation owners and applied a formalistic approach.

The applicants stated, in sum, that after 1992 without any fault on their part they saw themselves implicated in lengthy judicial battles to preserve their own apartment and eventually lost it owing to an unclear and unjust restitution law and decades-old administrative omissions on the part of municipal officials. After further proceedings they could only obtain in compensation a portion of the value of their property, without compensation for the improvements they had made or for the moral suffering they had endured in the process.

The Court considers, in the light of the parties ' submissions, that the complaint raises serious issues of fact and law under the Convention, the determination of which requires an examination of the merits. The Court concludes therefore that this complaint is not manifestly ill-founded within the meaning of Article 35 § 3 of the Convention. No other ground for declaring it inadmissible has been established.

For these reasons, the Cou rt unanimously

Declares the application admissible, without prejudging the merits of the case.

Søren Nielsen Christos Rozakis Registrar President