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The applicant owned a flat in Zagreb on the third floor, where he lived with his wife and two children. Three years after purchasing the flat, the third child of the couple was born. The child was born with several forms of physical and intellectual disabilities. In April 2008, a commission of experts diagnosed cerebral palsy, a serious restriction of mental abilities as well as epilepsy. In September 2008, the child was classified as 100% disabled by competent social services.

In the meantime, the plaintiff bought a house in Samobor and sold the flat in Zagreb in October 2008. According to the applicant, the reason for buying the house was that the building where the previous flat was located did not have a lift and was not adequate for the needs of the child with disabilities and his family. In particular, it was very difficult to get out of the flat with the son in his wheelchair to take him to the doctor, physiotherapy or kindergarten.

On 19 October 2006, after buying the house in Samobor, the applicant submitted a request for tax exemption to the Croatian tax authorities. He invoked section 11 of the Croatian Real Property Transfer Act.

This states that there is the possibility of tax exemption for persons who buy a house or a flat in order to provide themselves with adequate housing requirements, as long as they or their relatives do not own another flat or house that provides these housing requirements. In his request, the applicant argued that the flat he owned in Zagreb could not meet the requirements because it was difficult or impossible to move his son, in a wheelchair, out of the flat without a lift. The applicant stated that he had bought the new house in order to meet his son’s requirements.

On 6 May 2009, the tax office in Samobor rejected the request on the grounds that the previous flat in Zagreb met the requirements, both in terms of hygiene and technical requirements and in terms of basic infrastructure in the form of electricity and water connection. The tax office then claimed tax money in the amount of 11,250 euros. The applicant filed a complaint in this regard with the Ministry of Finance, which was also rejected.

On 7 September 2009, the applicant filed an administrative complaint with the Higher Administrative Court (Visoki upravni sud Republike Hrvatske), arguing that the previous institutions had ignored his son’s disability and resulting specific housing requirements. The applicant claimed that in his case the presence of a lift was an infrastructural requirement for adequate housing, similar to access to water or electricity.

Both the Higher Administrative Court and subsequently the Croatian Constitutional Court rejected the applicant’s complaint.

The Croatian government also accused the applicant of not initially addressing the fact that he suspected discrimination and of not exhausting all the possibilities offered by the Croatian mechanisms to combat discrimination before turning to the EctHR.

The applicant alleged that the Croatian authorities failed to conduct a proper investigation into his request for tax exemption, thereby depriving him of adequate means to protect his rights. In addition, the applicant argued that the authorities did not have viable approaches to the housing needs of persons with disabilities and that this failure constituted an indirect discrimination.  According to the applicant, the guidelines for adequate housing would only be derived from the requirements of persons without disabilities. The discrimination in this case therefore resulted from the Croatian authorities’ unreasonable interpretation of the statement “property that meets a family’s housing requirement”. However, the Croatian government claimed that the rejection of the application for tax exemption was not for discriminatory reasons, but a result of the applicant’s financial situation. The tax exemption was intended for the financially disadvantaged, to which the applicant did not belong, as he had already owned a satisfactory flat in Zagreb.