According to him, the provision of the Criminal Code, which allows the confiscation of property not based on income from persons who have committed property crimes, does not contradict the Constitution.
The Supreme Court indicated that the right to property is not absolute, and a person who has acquired property by criminal means cannot expect that it will be protected in accordance with Article 23 of the Constitution. It states that property is inviolable, property rights are protected by law.
According to the CT, the court can apply extended asset confiscation only after a detailed and impartial examination of all the circumstances based on the data collected by the prosecutor and, if necessary, by the court itself on the criminal origin of the accused’s acquired property.
“The Constitutional Court noted that a person who is targeted for extended confiscation of property does not have to prove that he did not commit a criminal act, he must justify the legality of the acquisition of the property and only when the prosecutor and the court collect enough data (evidence) to suggest that property that does not correspond to a person’s legal income is acquired in a criminal manner,” the court said.
The court also noted that when applying confiscation of property, it is not decided from what other specific criminal act the person acquired the property, nor is the question of imposing a punishment for that other specific criminal act.
A person convicted of bribery, to whom this measure was applied by the court’s decision, appealed to the Supreme Court with a complaint about the extended confiscation of assets.
The complaint alleges that property can be confiscated based on the mere assumption that it may have been obtained illegally, even though links to a criminal offense have not been proven, essentially allowing for the expropriation of a person’s property that is not necessarily illegally obtained.
The Criminal Code establishes that extended confiscation of property is the seizure of the property of the offender or its part, disproportionate to the legal income of the offender, into state property, when there is reason to believe that the property was obtained by criminal means.
Property can be confiscated from a person who is recognized as having committed a robbery, a serious or very serious intentional crime, from which he had or could have had a material benefit, and does not justify a high value, more than 9.5 thousand. euros, the legality of property acquisition.
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2024-09-28 04:53:41
