FIFTH SECTION
CASE OF MARZOUKI AND OTHERS v. BULGARIA
(Application no. 48636/19)
 
 
 
 
 
 
JUDGMENT
 
STRASBOURG
27 February 2025
 
This judgment is final but it may be subject to editorial revision. In the case of Marzouki and Others v. Bulgaria,
The European Court of Human Rights (Fifth Section), sitting as a Committee composed of:
 Stéphanie Mourou-Vikström, President,
 Gilberto Felici,
 Kateřina Šimáčková, judges,
and Sophie Piquet, Acting Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to:
the application (no. 48636/19) against the Republic of Bulgaria lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) on 5 September 2019 by a Tunisian and two Bulgarian nationals, whose relevant details are listed in the appended table (“the applicants”); the applicants were represented by Mr M. Ekimdzhiev, Ms K. Boncheva and Ms D. Kmetova-Mehmed, lawyers practising in Plovdiv;
the decision to give notice of the application to the Bulgarian Government (“the Government”), represented by their Agent, Ms R. Nikolova from the Ministry of Justice;
the parties’ observations;
Having deliberated in private on 30 January 2025,
Delivers the following judgment, which was adopted on that date:
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
1. The first applicant (see the appendix) is a Tunisian national, and the second and third applicants – his daughter and the child’s mother – are Bulgarian nationals. The case concerns the first applicant’s removal from Bulgaria where he had had his permanent residence, and his separation from the two other applicants. 2. In the beginning of 2018, the first applicant travelled to Serbia. Upon his return on 1 February 2018, he was refused entry into Bulgaria, and was given a standard refusal form. Two lines were checked in that document: one of them read “a person for whom an alert has been issued for the purposes of refusing entry”, and the other one referred to a person who “is considered to be a threat to public order, internal security, public health or international relations”. 3. Through a legal representative the first applicant applied for the judicial review of the above refusal. In the ensuing proceedings the border police explained that it had acted upon a decision of the State Agency for National Security (hereinafter “the SANS”) of 1 February 2018, imposing on the first applicant a five-year entry ban on the ground that he had posed a national security threat. The refusal of entry was upheld in a judgment of the Sofia Region Administrative Court of 29 October 2018, on the ground that the border police had been bound to make it after the decision of the SANS. 4. The decision of the SANS was served on the first applicant’s representative on 31 July 2018; he had requested a copy after learning about it in the above-mentioned proceedings. The decision did not contain specific reasoning to justify the conclusion that the applicant posed a threat to national security, referring instead of that to a classified document named “Proposal”. That Proposal has been declassified in the meantime and has been submitted by the Government (see below). 5. After receiving a copy of the SANS decision, the first applicant’s representative applied for judicial review, but the application was declared time-barred by the Supreme Administrative Court in a final decision of 6 March 2019. It was found that the fourteen-day time-limit to contest the decision had started to run on 1 February 2018, when the applicant had been “orally informed” of it; this finding apparently referred to the standard refusal form given to the applicant at the border (see paragraph 2 above). According to the Supreme Administrative Court, the applicant had been validly informed of the SANS decision in that manner, in accordance with Article 61 § 2 of the Code of Administrative Procedure. As worded at the time, that provision allowed oral notification of an administrative decision to the interested parties (see more in paragraph 24 below). 6. The applicants complained that the removal of the first of them from the territory of Bulgaria had been unjustified and had disrupted their family life together. They complained in addition under Article 13 of the Convention in conjunction with Article 8 of the lack of effective domestic remedies.

Article of the Convention at issue: Article 8
Outcome: violation