Legal summary
June 2026
Taleski v. North Macedonia - 34261/23 and 7877/24
Judgment 23.6.2026 [Section II]
Article 6
Article 6-1
Fair hearing
Legislative intervention with retrospective effect permitting the annulment of the presidential pardons granted to the applicants and the continuation of the criminal proceedings leading to their conviction: no violation
Fair hearing
Adversarial trial
Failure to serve two of the applicants with a copy of the higher prosecutor’s submissions in the proceedings before the Court of Appeal: violation
Facts – The three applicants were subject to criminal proceedings for offences relating either to corruption or to electoral misconduct. On 12 April 2016 they were granted presidential pardons not following trial and conviction, but for the specific purpose of preventing the continuation of criminal proceedings against them. On 20 May 2016 Parliament enacted the 2016 Pardon Act, which conferred on the President the power to annul a pardon under certain conditions. On 27 May 2016 the President declared the pardons in respect of the applicants null and void. They were subsequently convicted of criminal offences. Their appeals and requests for extraordinary review were unsuccessful.
In the criminal proceedings against the first applicant, the trial and appellate courts held that he could lawfully be prosecuted following the annulment of the pardon. In the criminal proceedings against the second and third applicants, the appellate court held that by pleading guilty they had implicitly waived their substantive objections concerning the pardons. In both cases, the Supreme Court held that the pardon decisions had been null and void ab initio and had never had any legal effect, as they had been granted without any legal basis.
Relying on Article 6 § 1 of the Convention, the applicants essentially complained that the criminal proceedings pursued against them after the pardons had been contrary to the principles of legal certainty and the rule of law. The second and third applicants complained under the same provision that the criminal proceedings had been unfair, as in the proceedings before the Court of Appeal they had not been served with a copy of the higher prosecutor’s submissions suggesting that their appeal should be dismissed as unfounded.
Law – Article 6 § 1:
(1) Legislative intervention permitting the annulment of the presidential pardons granted to the applicants and the continuation of the criminal proceedings against them – The question that arose was whether the legislative intervention through the 2016 Pardon Act had undermined the fairness of the criminal proceedings against the applicants by influencing their outcome while those proceedings had been ongoing.
Under the domestic law applicable when the pardons had been granted, they had constituted final and irrevocable acts of clemency by the President. At the time there had been no legal mechanism for challenging, revoking or setting aside pardons. Such a mechanism had been subsequently introduced by the 2016 Pardon Act, notably by giving the President temporary exceptional power, without being required to provide reasons, to annul a pardon granted with no prior proceedings. Given that the mechanism had remained in force for only 30 days, it had been clear that it was intended to apply to past pardons rather than to future ones. It therefore had had retrospective effect.
In view of the divergent opinions at domestic level, particularly between Parliament and the Supreme Court as to whether the pardons were null and void ab initio, or whether they were valid in law and required annulment as a necessary precondition for the continuation of prosecution, the Court did not consider it necessary to resolve the disagreement between the parties on the interpretation of domestic law and to decide whether the 2016 Pardon Act and the annulment decisions taken pursuant to it had influenced the outcome of the criminal proceedings against the applicants. Even assuming that the Act had influenced their outcome - by enabling the annulment of previously irrevocable pardons and the continuation of criminal proceedings that would otherwise have been discontinued - the Court considered that, in the specific circumstances of the present case, the legislative intervention had been based on compelling grounds of general interest and accordingly could not be regarded as having breached the principles of legal certainty or the rule of law.
In reaching that conclusion the Court assessed the compelling nature of the grounds put forward by the Government, in particular, that the pardons - granted ultra vires - had exempted serious systemic wrongdoing from criminal scrutiny, undermining the rule of law. In doing so it considered the manner and timing of the enactment of the legislation and the foreseeability of the legislative intervention, the scope of the legislation and its effects.
The Court did not see any reason to question the Supreme Court’s findings. That court, after an extensive analysis, had found that the pardons had been without any legal basis, as they had been granted under section 11 of the 1993 Pardon Act, a provision which, at the material time, had ceased to form part of the domestic legal order. That provision had been repealed by the 2009 Pardon Act which was then repealed on 16 March 2016 by the Constitutional Court as being unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, relying on the Constitutional Court’s settled and relevant case-law, found that the Constitutional Court’s decision had not restored section 11 of the 1993 Pardon Act. The Court therefore considered that the pardons had been tainted by a fundamental defect capable of justifying a departure from the principle of legal certainty.
As regards the principle of the rule of law, the Court observed that the present case involved a tension between two of its elements: legal certainty, on the one hand, and accountability and equality before the law, on the other. As regards the latter element, the Court reiterated that addressing impunity was essential to upholding the rule of law. It was significant that the legislature, by enacting the 2016 Pardon Act, had sought to restore the rule of law by ensuring that public officials, including those of the highest rank, who had been granted immunity from prosecution by the President acting without a valid legal basis, were brought to justice. In the present case, therefore, the need to maintain the accountability of public officials and ensure that they were not placed above the law had outweighed the need to safeguard legal certainty.
In addition, the Court attached importance to the fact that doubts as to the validity of the pardons had become immediately apparent, and that calls for their annulment had promptly ensued. It had therefore been foreseeable that steps would be taken to set them aside. The legislative intervention had taken place following an extensive public debate and a search for a balanced solution, with the 2016 Pardon Act being enacted less than six weeks after the pardons had been granted, and the annulments following a week thereafter. During that period, the criminal proceedings against the applicants had still been ongoing and no decision to discontinue them had been taken by the investigating authorities or by the courts. During the short period before their annulment, the presidential pardons had not been given any practical effect by a judicial decision, still less by one possessing res judicata effect. Nor did the legislative intervention have the effect of allowing the reopening of proceedings previously terminated with res judicata effect. Furthermore, the 2016 Pardon Act had no bearing on the substantive determination of the cases, as it did not alter the basis of criminal liability for the offences that had been attributed to the applicants or the penalties applicable to them. Consequently, it had not influenced the judicial determination of the case in any substantive respect.
In so far as the applicants had claimed that the 2016 Pardon Act had specifically targeted them, the Court noted that its principal purpose had been to enable the annulment of presidential pardons in certain situations. One of those situations had concerned pardons which had been granted without preliminary pardon proceedings; such pardons could be declared null and void without any reasons being provided within 30 days of its enactment. Given the very limited number of pardons ever granted without preliminary pardon proceedings, that provision of the 2016 Pardon Act had affected a small, easily identifiable group and had been clearly aimed at the pardons granted on 12 April 2016 to 56 people, including the applicants. In that connection, the Court took into account the exceptional nature of the situation which had been created by the then President’s decision to grant pardons to public officials, including senior figures from his own political party, without a valid legal basis and in breach of the rule of law. The gravity of the situation and of the ensuing political crisis had justified the adoption of exceptional measures in the form of legislation targeting a small group of individuals who would otherwise have benefited from unlawful pardons, with the aim of restoring the rule of law.
Lastly, the Court found that its findings in the case of Lexa v. Slovakia were irrelevant to the present case, distinguishing the cases both legally and factually. Lexa had concerned the lawfulness of the applicant’s detention under Article 5 § 1 and not a legislative intervention during the proceedings under Article 6 § 1. In that case, the Court had held that the applicant’s detention, following the discontinuance of the criminal proceedings against him with res judicata effect after a decision granting him amnesty, had not been permissible under domestic law. The amnesty decision had been clearly lawful, and its subsequent revocation plainly unlawful under domestic law, whereas in the present case the situation had been reversed. Furthermore, unlike in the present case, the criminal proceedings against the applicant in Lexa had been resumed after being discontinued with res judicata effect.
Conclusion: no violation (unanimously).
(2) Failure to serve the second and third applicants with a copy of the higher prosecutor’s submissions in the proceedings before the Court of Appeal – The domestic law made no mention of the issue of serving a higher prosecutor’s submissions before the Court of Appeal on the defence. Although it did not prevent the Court of Appeal from serving those submissions on the applicants and affording them an opportunity to reply, the absence of any express provision obliging it to do so had undoubtedly contributed to the situation complained of.
The Court did not accept the Government’s argument that the adversarial principle had nonetheless been complied with because the second applicant, together with his own counsel and that of the third applicant, had attended the appeal hearing at which the higher prosecutor had presented his submissions and thus could have responded to those submissions immediately during the hearing or requested an adjournment, which they had not done. The Court had already rejected similar arguments in the case of Bosak and Others v. Croatia and saw no reason to reach a different conclusion in the present case. In particular, in that case it had held that making the defence’s knowledge of the prosecution’s observations entirely contingent upon its presence at the appeal hearing had placed a disproportionate burden on the defence and did not necessarily ensure a real opportunity to comment on those observations.
As regards the Government’s argument that the applicants had subsequently lodged requests for extraordinary review with the Supreme Court in which they had been able to respond to the higher prosecutor’s submissions, the Court observes that that court had refused to quash the impugned judgment and confirmed the second and third applicant’s convictions. It reiterated that the issue to be examined was whether, in the applicants’ case, the defence had been afforded an effective opportunity to familiarise itself with the prosecution’s submissions and to comment on their content in an appropriate form and within an appropriate time frame before the appeal judgment had been given. In any event, even assuming that failure to serve the prosecutor’s submissions on a defendant might, in principle, be remedied by the possibility of discussing the same issues before a higher court, the Court had to examine whether, given the Supreme Court’s scope of review, all the issues raised in the higher prosecutor’s submissions could have been re-examined in the extraordinary review proceedings.
The appeals of the second and third applicants only concerned points of law as they had been precluded from appealing on factual grounds, having pleaded guilty during the trial. The fact that the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction did not extend to factual matters was therefore irrelevant. However, in his submissions to the Court of Appeal the higher prosecutor had also commented, among other legal issues, on the proportionality of the sentences. Given that the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction in matters of sentencing was confined to determining whether the lower courts had exceeded their statutory powers when imposing a sentence and did not extend to assessing the proportionality of sentences, that issue had been finally determined in the appeal proceedings and could not be re-examined by the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the extraordinary review proceedings did not remedy the shortcomings of the appeal proceedings in that regard. The only possible means of remedying the defects in the appeal proceedings would therefore have been for the Supreme Court to quash the appeal judgment and to refer the case back to the Court of Appeal. By not doing so, the Supreme Court had failed to redress the violation of the applicants’ right to adversarial proceedings.
Conclusion: violation in respect of the second applicant (five votes to two); violation in respect of the third applicant (unanimously).
Article 41: EUR 3,600 in respect of non-pecuniary damage to the second and third applicants.
(See Lexa v. Slovakia, 54334/00, 23 September 2008, Legal Summary; Bosak and Others v. Croatia, 40429/14 et al, 6 June 2019; Bajić v. North Macedonia, 2833/13, 10 June 2021; Vegotex International S.A. v. Belgium [GC], 49812/09, 3 November 2022, Legal Summary; Taleski and Others v. North Macedonia (dec.), 77796/17 et al, 24 January 2023, Legal Summary)
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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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