HFII - Initiative for legal certainty in the Western Balkans

Back Strengthening the protection of the right to the peaceful enjoyment of property in the Western Balkans

The issue of protection of the right to the peaceful enjoyment of property, guaranteed under Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) is among the crucial for the region of the Western Balkans. The very nature of some problems, such as restitution of nationalised property or the foreign currency savings in banks of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is determined partly by the region’s post-conflict and post-transition status. Other issues, such as non-enforcement of decisions of national courts or non-payment of pensions, are of a more general nature, not uncommon throughout many of the Council of Europe Member States.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in its case law established well-defined approaches on what the right to property includes, and what remedies should be available in order to secure it. Still, the autonomous meaning of the concept of “possessions” as applied by the ECtHR does not always correspond to the definitions of property in national legislation. This creates difficulty for national courts to coherently apply the Convention in this respect.

The online regional conference “Protection of property: ECtHR and national case-law in the Western Balkans” which took place on 9 December 2020 provided a platform for a discussion among the legal professionals from the countries of the region, on the challenges related to the enjoyment of the right to property. The discussion focused on general standards as applied to concrete cases, as well as on the situation of the execution of the ECtHR judgments as regards property rights.

The speakers were former and current lawyers of the Registry of the ECtHR, lawyers from the Department for the Execution of Judgments of the ECtHR, judges and senior advisors to the superior and higher national courts and international experts in the field of protection of property.

The conference will be followed by a report which will be published in early 2021.

The activity was organised within the action “Initiative for the legal certainty in the Western Balkans”, implemented in the framework of the joint programme of the European Union and the Council of Europe “Horizontal Facility for the Western Balkans and Turkey 2019-2022”.

Concept and programme of the conference: English - Albanian - Macedonian - Bosnian/ Montenegrin/Serbian