Published on 3 August 2026
SECOND SECTION
Application no. 53067/22
Bojan JOVANOVSKI
against North Macedonia
lodged on 7 November 2022
communicated on 2 July 2026
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
The application concerns the confiscation of the applicant’s assets in the context of criminal proceedings against him.
The applicant was convicted for having accepted, together with a co‑accused, 1,500,000 euros in order to influence the Special Public Prosecutor to undertake certain actions in a set of criminal proceedings against a third person, and for having laundered the unlawfully obtained money, including through buying luxury furniture, clothes, shoes, accessories and works of arts. The trial court issued a confiscation order concerning numerous works of art, pieces of furniture, large quantities of clothes, shoes, bags, accessories, as well as some banknotes and other items, which had previously been seized from the applicant. The court did not accept the applicant’s arguments that he had bought many of those items before the offences had been committed, and the photographs which he submitted in support of that argument. The Appeal and Supreme Court confirmed the confiscation order.
The applicant complains under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention that the confiscated items had not been properly identified, that their value, the time when they had been bought and their origin was not assessed, and that he did not have an effective opportunity to prove that they had been bought prior to the offence.
QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES
Has there been a violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention on account of the confiscation of the applicant’s property in the criminal proceedings (see, for the general principles, G.I.E.M. S.r.l. and Others v. Italy [GC], nos. 1828/06 and 2 others, §§ 289, 292 and 293, 28 June 2018)? Was the applicant afforded a reasonable opportunity to put his case to the competent authorities for the purpose of effectively challenging the confiscation of his items (ibid, § 302; see also, mutatis mutandis, Džinić v. Croatia, no. 38359/13, §§ 68-81, 17 May 2016; Rummi v. Estonia, no. 63362/09, § 108, 15 January 2015; and Silickienė v. Lithuania, no. 20496/02, § 68, 10 April 2012)?