crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
– The Act on Denationalisation of 1991 which provides for full restitution or compensation at
approximately the value of property in the market. 17
Yet, the Sirc case was complicated by the fact that the entire Sirc property had been confiscated
earlier, i.e. in June 1941, by the invading Germans who occupied Kranj, the location of Sirc property
in northwestern Slovenia. The occupiers liquidated the Sirc textile factory, sold the machinery and
inventories of raw materials and finished goods, and installed a production of rocket component parts
in the existing building. The rocket production was stopped in autumn 1944, and the buildings burned
down in 1945.
At the end of the war in 1945, legislation was passed for restitution of, or compensation for, property
(confiscated by German occupiers) to the rightful owners: “Section 1 of the 1945 Yugoslav Act on the
Treatment of Property which Owners were obliged to abandon during the Occupation or of Property
appropriated by the Occupying Forces or their Collaborators (Zakon o ravnanju z imovino, katero so
lastniki morali zapustiti med okupacijo, ter z imovino, katero so jim odvzeli okupator ali njegovi
pomogači, Official Journal of the Democratic Federative Yugoslavia, no. 36/45, and of the Federative
People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, no. 105/46) provided for immediate restitution of confiscated property
(immovable and moveable assets, rights, enterprises with machinery and stock, etc.) to its owners. It also
entitled the owners to claim compensation for damage to the property and for income or profit realised
from the property by third parties. Pursuant to Section 2 (amended to become Section 5), compensation
for such income and profit was to be qualified in accordance with the civil law, i.e. the law of tort.” 18
Franjo Sirc submitted the required requests for restitution or compensation with the appropriate
district courts, but before any final decision could be taken, the communist confiscation took place.
Hence, what the communist authorities confiscated was mostly claims for restitution or compensation.
In the early 1990’s, when all the required submissions had been launched, the courts and, in one instance,
administration, were working rather smoothly. Restitution to the Sirc family included the family house,
a small building on a minute part of the factory ground, the ground floor of a house nationalised when
owned by Mrs Sirc and two parts of a garden without the third, and best, part.
Even more significantly, the so-called contentious proceedings dealing with parts of Sirc property
which was confiscated in 1947 under a general formula without individual confiscation orders, came to
a partly successful end at the Ljubljana provincial court on 23 November 1996 under I P 355/95. The
judge granted compensation of approximately $1 million for “Russian cotton” and “Turkish cotton” plus
some machinery. She, however, refused compensation for textiles which the German Commission sold
to various merchants saying that such compensation was the responsibility of the German occupants.
However, the Act on the Treatment of Property seized by the occupants (UE DFJ 25/5/1945) provides
precisely that the legal owner is entitled to request compensation from the buying merchants. Both
parties appealed.
Yet, before the Higher Court in Ljubljana could react to the appeals, the legal changes occurred
(described in the Order of this Court quoted under Part I C, above), thus opening the question of ex post
facto legislation.
4. Application to the European Court of Human Rights
Ljubo Sirc first wrote to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe on 13 August 1998 and
then submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) an application form that was duly
filled-in on 25 October 1998. The file number is 44580/93.
The applicant quoted as relevant the following Articles of the European Convention of Human
Rights: Article 6, Article 14, Article1 of Protocol 1 and Article 3 of Protocol 7, especially complaining
about retroactive legislation, reasonable time, and the moral political qualification of the judges in
Slovenia. The application to the ECHR was submitted after an appeal to the Slovene Constitutional
17
This text is clearly stated in the Final Decision issued by the European Court of Human Rights of 22 June 2006, under No. 44580/98, Sirc
v. Slovenia.
18
The preceding paragraph is printed in both the Partial Decision of 16 May 2002 and the Final Decision of 22 June 2006 by the Third
Section of the European Court of Human Rights.
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