FIRST SECTION
DECISION
Application no. 17242/22
Marcel FORAI
against Slovakia
The European Court of Human Rights (First Section), sitting on 5 February 2026 as a Committee composed of:
Frédéric Krenc, President,
Davor Derenčinović,
Alain Chablais, judges,
and Liv Tigerstedt, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to:
the application (no. 17242/22) against the Slovak Republic lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) on 28 March 2022 by a Slovak national, Mr Marcel Forai (“the applicant”), who was born in 1970, lives in Bratislava and was represented by Mr S. Jakubčík, a lawyer practising in Bratislava;
the decision to give notice of the complaints under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, taken alone and in conjunction with Article 13 of the Convention, concerning the freezing of the applicant’s assets to the Government of the Slovak Republic (“the Government”), represented by their Agent, Ms M. Bálintová, and to declare the remainder of the application inadmissible;
the parties’ observations;
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
1. The case concerns the freezing of assets belonging to the applicant on the basis of a set of orders issued by the Prešov regional office of the Public Prosecution Service (“the PPS”). The orders were issued on 22 October 2020 under Article 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (concerning bank accounts – zaistenie peňažných prostriedkov) and on 13 November 2020 under Article 96 of the same Code (concerning registered shares – zaistenie zaknihovaných cenných papierov) in the context of criminal proceedings against the applicant on charges of breach of trust (porušovanie povinnosti pri správe cudzieho majetku).
2. The charges related to the applicant’s involvement – as the chairman of the board of directors of a major State-owned health insurer in Slovakia (“the insurer”) between 2012 and 2015 – in the signing or amendment of contracts with a specific healthcare provider (“the provider”). Those contracts extended insurance coverage by the insurer to certain treatments in the areas of rehabilitation medicine and balneology which were not included in the catalogue of treatments covered by health insurance under the relevant legislation. This resulted in additional costs for the insurer (“the additional costs”) and a fine in the amount of 75,000 euros (EUR), which was imposed on it by the Healthcare Surveillance Authority (“the HCSA”). The fine is being contested in a separate set of proceedings, which are ongoing. The criminal proceedings against the applicant are also ongoing.
3. The case raises issues under Articles 6 and 13 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1.
THE COURT’S ASSESSMENT
Issues under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, taken alone and in conjunction with Article 13 of the Convention4. The applicant asserted that the freezing of his assets and the dismissal of requests made by him to have them unfrozen had been arbitrary. In that connection, the Court notes that in so far as he can be understood as wishing to extend his complaints to the initial freezing orders (which were issued in 2020), and irrespective of any issues of exhaustion of domestic remedies, such complaints (having been lodged in 2022) would be out of time for the purposes of Article 35 § 1 of the Convention. The Court reiterates that it has jurisdiction to apply of its own motion the rule on the time-limit for lodging an application (see Sabri Güneş v. Turkey [GC], no. 27396/06, § 29, 29 June 2012).
5. The scope of the application may accordingly be defined as concerning the freezing of the applicant’s assets in relation to the outcome of his unfreezing requests lodged on 14 December 2020 and 5 May 2022, which culminated in the Constitutional Court’s decisions of 30 November 2021 (“the 2021 constitutional decision”) and 8 February 2023 (“the 2023 constitutional decision”).
6. Within that scope, the applicant argued before the Court – as he had at the national level – that the value of the frozen assets had been in excess of any damage allegedly caused to the insurer. Moreover, even though the underlying proceedings had lasted a long time, not a single piece of evidence capable of establishing that the frozen assets were instrumentalities or proceeds of a crime had been provided.
7. The Court notes from the outset that there is no doubt that the applicant was the lawful owner of the frozen assets. The property at issue was accordingly his “possession”. Freezing it amounted to an interference with his right to the peaceful enjoyment of his possession, in the form of control of the use of property. The Court must accordingly establish whether that interference was lawful and “in accordance with the general interest”, and whether there existed a reasonable relationship of proportionality between the means employed and the aim sought to be realised (see Džinić v. Croatia, no. 38359/13, §§ 59-62, 17 May 2016, with further references).
8. The freezing of the applicant’s assets was based on the statutory provisions cited in paragraph 1 above, which specifically governed the freezing of bank accounts and registered shares. As explained by the PPS and confirmed in the 2021 constitutional decision, the applicant’s argument that the freezing order should have been governed by Articles 425 et seq. of the Code of Criminal Procedure (which at the relevant time regulated the freezing of all of an accused person’s assets) was misguided and unfounded. In so far as the freezing of all of an accused person’s assets depended on the likelihood of those assets ultimately being confiscated, and in so far as the regional office of the PPS in its decision of 17 May 2022 had stated that the confiscation of the applicant’s assets was likely, the Prosecutor General on 15 August 2022 and the 2023 constitutional decision both acknowledged that it had been a mistake for the PPS to rely on such a likelihood. Nevertheless, as the Prosecutor General and the Constitutional Court also concluded, the freezing of the applicant’s assets had still been justified on other, independent grounds. The Court accordingly accepts the interference in issue as lawful for the purposes of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1.
9. It further agrees that the freezing measure was considered necessary in order to facilitate the confiscation of the proceeds of a crime, an aim which is accepted as being in the general interest of the community (see, for example, Borzhonov v. Russia, no. 18274/04, § 58, 22 January 2009, with further references).
10. It remains to be determined whether a fair balance was struck between the general interest and what was at stake for the applicant. In this respect, the Court observes that the freezing order was based on the results of an internal audit by the insurer and a report by the National Audit Office concluding that the applicable rules had been breached and that the suspected damage to the insurer had been more than EUR 1.5 million. An expert report of 23 October 2023 further estimated that the amount of the suspected damage, consisting of the additional costs, ranged between EUR 3.6 million and EUR 4 million.
11. Even though the freezing order was nominally issued in respect of assets owned by the applicant worth EUR 1,065,671.69, the regional office of the PPS later determined (on 26 February 2025) that the value of the money and shares actually frozen amounted to EUR 757,017.
12. In support of his complaints before the domestic courts and the Court, the applicant relied on the fact that the damages claimed by the representative of the insurer in the proceedings against him had been limited to the amount of the fine imposed on it by the HCSA – that is, EUR 75,000. In other words, the insurer’s estimation of the damage which it had sustained had not included the additional costs. The Court notes that such a third-party claim for damages was indeed made by the representative of the insurer in his application of 21 January 2021. As explained in the decision of the regional office of the PPS of 17 May 2022 – which rejected the applicant’s unfreezing request of 5 May 2022, and which was endorsed and supplemented by the Prosecutor General on 15 August 2022 – the scope of the third-party claim for damages was not decisive for the purposes of the freezing of the applicant’s assets. The choice of whether or not to lodge such a claim was a matter of purely subjective interest to the insurer. The freezing measure, however, served the purpose of preventing the applicant from making use of the assets in question, which were suspected proceeds of a crime and corresponded to the damage objectively sustained by the insurer.
13. At any rate, the Court notes that the determination of the amount of damage was subject to the ongoing proceedings, and the amount actually frozen was far from being in excess of the overall amount of suspected damage.
14. The first part of applicant’s assets was frozen on 22 October 2020 and the last of his unfreezing requests under the Court’s review (see paragraph 5 above) was dismissed by the Office of the Prosecutor General on 15 August 2022. The relevant period for the Court to consider accordingly lasted less than one year and ten months. This is not altered by the duration of the subsequent constitutional review in particular because, in accordance with the subsidiarity principle, the Constitutional Court retrospectively reviewed the assessment of the Prosecutor General, rather than the underlying situation at the time of its decision (see, mutatis mutandis, Ribár v. Slovakia, no. 56545/21, §§ 60, 61 and 78, 12 December 2024). Moreover, the constitutional review did not prevent the applicant from repeating his unfreezing requests (Article 95 § 8 and Article 96 § of the Code of Criminal Procedure).
15. With reference to the situation under the Court’s review, as specified in the preceding paragraph, in addition to what is noted in paragraph 8 above, the Prosecutor General reiterated and summarised the reasoning relied on by the authorities previously, pointing to the charges against the applicant and the ongoing proceedings in respect of them. The freezing of his assets had constituted an interference with his property rights, but he remained the owner of those assets, and they formed only a part of his total assets. He had no legal duty to pay alimony or to financially support any other person; he also had another bank account containing funds which were not frozen, and managed and owned several businesses. In other words, his ability to support himself on a day-to-day basis was unhindered. In this respect, the Court finds the present case clearly distinguishable from, for example, Narbutas v. Lithuania (no. 14139/21, § 323, 19 December 2023).
The Prosecutor General noted that at the relevant stage of the proceedings there had been no need to be certain that the assets in question were the proceeds of the offence under investigation, but merely that there was a reasonable likelihood of that being the case. According to the Prosecutor General such a likelihood had indeed existed in the situation at hand, having regard to the evidence collected in the case, in particular in relation to the suspected increase in the provider’s income resulting from the applicant’s suspected actions, the development of the applicant’s own financial situation, and the established reality behind his explanation that he had obtained funds on credit from various businesses, consisting of the fact that the companies which he cited had all been managed and owned by him.
16. Having regard to all of the above, the Court finds that the contested freezing cannot be seen as being manifestly without reasonable foundation. Accordingly, they are accepted as being within the State’s wide margin of appreciation in the given area (see, for example, Benet Czech, spol. s r.o. v. the Czech Republic, no. 31555/05, §§ 35, 36 and 40, 21 October 2010, with further references).
17. As regards the requirement of procedural safeguards (see Džinić, cited above, § 68), the assessment by the PPS was subject to a judicial review by the Constitutional Court. No objections with regard to the jurisdictional or procedural parameters of the review having been made, there are no prima facie grounds for doubting the effectiveness of that mechanism for the purposes of Article 13 of the Convention.
18. Accordingly, this part of the application is manifestly ill-founded and must be rejected in accordance with Article 35 §§ 3 (a) and 4 of the Convention.
Remaining issues19. Relying on Article 6 § 1 and Article 13 of the Convention, the applicant argued that his interlocutory appeals against the decisions of the PPS to dismiss his unfreezing requests had been arbitrarily determined by the Prosecutor General, whereas they should have been determined by a court. The reasoning given by the Constitutional Court in that regard had likewise been arbitrary. Should such appeals have been determined by a court, their review would have been subject to a five-day time-limit. As this was not the case, the time-limit did not apply, and the applicant contended that his unfreezing request of 14 December 2020 had not been determined within a reasonable time.
20. The Court considers that, in the light of all the material in its possession and in so far as the matters complained of are within its competence, these complaints either do not meet the admissibility criteria set out in Articles 34 and 35 of the Convention or do not disclose any appearance of a violation of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Convention or the Protocols thereto.
21. It follows that this part of the application must likewise be rejected in accordance with Article 35 § 4 of the Convention.
For these reasons, the Court, unanimously,
Declares the application inadmissible.
Done in English and notified in writing on 5 March 2026.
Liv Tigerstedt Frédéric Krenc
Deputy Registrar President