The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg has ordered urgent legislative and policy reform to end the systematic destruction of Roma homes in Bulgaria. This week’s landmark ruling in Aleksieva v. Bulgaria, with representation by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) on behalf of the 56 applicants, addresses a twenty-year pattern of discriminatory forced evictions. It also marks a highly undemocratic lack of state compliance: whereas similar planned evictions may have been successfully blocked in the past (see Yordanova v. Bulgaria, another BHC case), that has not always been the norm. Local authorities are now emboldened enough to routinely ignore procedural rules and ECtHR orders in neighborhoods like Sofia’s Zaharna Fabrika (April 2025) and Stara Zagora’s Lozenets (August 2026), where hundreds of residents were made homeless. Earlier this summer, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty expressed deep concern over the situation of anti-Roma eviction campaigns against a background of policy gaps that leave people with nowhere to turn.
The Aleksieva judgment exposes the cruelty of these recent campaigns. In June 2023, residents of Sofia’s Orlandovtsi district received eviction notices without any contact information or instructions for legal recourse. By August of that year, municipal excavators had flattened the neighbourhood. Though the Strasbourg court issued an emergency order the next day demanding the halt of demolitions and provision of immediate shelter, most of the homes were already rubble. Families were left on the street or crammed into unlivable caravans without running water or sanitation.
Bulgaria was found to have committed a severe violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 (right to private and family life). This is the fourth time the ECtHR has condemned Bulgaria for the exact same malpractice: domestic courts refusing to grant a fair review of the impact of forced evictions on families simply because they lack formal property deeds. Sofia’s chief architect was also heavily criticised for giving misleading information to displaced residents and the Ombudsman’s office, with the court concluding that these demolitions merely carried a “veneer of legality” and were engineered to lock residents out of the legal process.
The Strasbourg court has established that failure to own property doesn’t justify state-enforced homelessness. Bulgaria is legally required to amend its legislation so everyone has the right to challenge an eviction order before the bulldozers arrive. Crucially, the right to housing under Article 8 does not obligate the state to provide free housing to citizens; rather, it prohibits the state from destroying a person’s sole shelter and making them homeless without proper legal recourse.
“Today’s ruling goes far beyond this specific case; the problem is systemic,” stated Adela Katchaounova, BHC Co-Chair. “Bulgaria must amend the law so that no one can be deprived of their only home without genuine access to the courts. Swift legislative and institutional reforms are necessary to prevent these violations from happening again.”
