Effects of expropriation on the ownership

Property rights have ever since their inception assumed a great importance comparable to the right to life in all societies. Every society has thus developed its own norms to protect the individual right to property. These legal norms have taken forms depending on the circumstances of the day in each given society. However, the individual right to property has come under attack as the State or those who act on its behalf fails to meet societal demands and is restricted or subject to forceable dispossession. Confiscation of property is essentially the result of the State's failure to meet the society's demands. In the formation of the statehood, the restriction of individual rights in law by other legal means has formed the social order. The State that conferred property rights to natural persons by law revokes them for the benefit of the society at large and thus aims to strike a balance between individual interests and those of the society. Confiscation on the other hand has gained momentum with the rise of welfare state. States struggling to meet the social needs due to limited resources have turned to private property as an alternative resource and begun to expropriate them for public use. The right to property finds its expression in numerous domestic legislation and international documents. Notably, Additional Protocol I of the European Convention of Human Rights provides for it as various aspects to it are reviewed and interpreted in many decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in such a way as to influence and change domestic rules on confiscation of private property, and where no such direct impact on domestic laws exists, to contribute to the formation of universal norms. In this work, the question as to whether or not confiscation amounts to a major encroachment on the substance of private property rights is dealt with in the first part. Then there will be an attempt to evaluate how States perceive the right to property in the process of confiscation. Criteria for the determination of compensation for confiscation in national and international laws are studied. Finally the thesis aims to look into how such criteria are determined in the process of setting compensation and whether such criteria do really compensate the feeling of loss caused by the owners' forced dispossession of their assets. Keywords: Ownership, Expropriation, Expropriation Clawing, Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, Public İnterest, Cost Determination.