Background
Luan Daci, a former Tirana District Court judge, was dismissed following disciplinary proceedings in 1997. In February 2017, he applied to become a judge of Albania’s Special Appeal Chamber, one of the bodies established to vet serving judges and prosecutors. His application stated that he had never been subject to dismissal or another disciplinary measure still in force, and his curriculum vitae omitted his prior judicial service. During a parliamentary hearing, he disclosed that he had served as a judge but said that he had resigned. Parliament appointed him to the Chamber.
Albanian prosecutors later charged Daci with falsifying a document under Article 186 of the Criminal Code. The domestic courts treated his application as a private document capable of “intellectual falsification” because it omitted his disciplinary dismissal and thereby enabled his appointment. He received a six-month suspended prison sentence. The Supreme Court twice upheld the conviction, and the Constitutional Court rejected his complaint by five votes to four. Daci then applied to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the legal basis for his conviction had not been foreseeable.
The Court’s Holding
The European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that Albania violated Article 7 of the Convention, which requires criminal offences to be defined by accessible and reasonably foreseeable law. The decisive question was not whether Daci had deliberately concealed his dismissal, but whether he could reasonably have foreseen in February 2017 that omitting it from his application constituted “falsification of a document” under Article 186.
The Court found no pre-existing domestic case-law applying Article 186’s concept of “intellectual falsification” to this kind of privately authored application. The sole Supreme Court precedent invoked by the domestic courts postdated Daci’s conduct and concerned an entirely fabricated instrument presented as an official public document. Article 190, moreover, expressly criminalized false information on forms submitted to State bodies, while the Vetting Act prescribed no application form and gave no warning of criminal liability. Subsequent Albanian decisions involving comparable private documents also adopted divergent approaches. The Supreme Court had therefore created a new offence in Daci’s case by construing Article 186 extensively and unforeseeably to his detriment, in a manner inconsistent with the essence of the offence.
The Court rejected Daci’s pecuniary-damage claim because the violation concerned his criminal conviction rather than his dismissal from the Special Appeal Chamber. It held that the Article 7 violation itself constituted sufficient just satisfaction for non-pecuniary damage, noting that Albanian law allowed him to seek reopening of the criminal proceedings. It also rejected his unsupported claim for costs and expenses.
Key Takeaways
- Article 7 permits courts to clarify criminal statutes, but not to expand them unforeseeably or by analogy to an accused person’s detriment.
- A defendant’s legal expertise does not cure the absence of a reasonably foreseeable basis for treating previously uncriminalized conduct as an offence.
- Later, inconsistent domestic decisions reinforced the conclusion that Article 186 did not provide a sufficiently clear basis for criminalizing omissions in Daci’s private application.
Why It Matters
The judgment underscores that legitimate concerns about honesty in public appointments cannot substitute for a clear, contemporaneous basis in criminal law. Even conduct that authorities regard as intentionally deceptive may not be punished under a statute whose essential elements did not foreseeably cover that conduct when it occurred.
The ruling also illustrates the evidentiary importance of domestic precedent under Article 7. A novel interpretation may be permissible, but only when it remains foreseeable and consistent with the offence’s essence; contradictory later decisions can expose an interpretation as insufficiently precise and vulnerable to arbitrary enforcement.