Greek Council of State bars seizure of family home over state debts without asset check

The ruling

Greece's Council of State (ΣτΕ) has held that the state cannot seize and auction a debtor's only family home over unpaid public debts unless it has first examined, and documented in writing, whether the debtor owns other assets that could cover the sum. The decision, numbered 1404/2026, was issued by the court's Sixth Section, presided over by vice-president Ioannis Gravaris, with Eleni Papadimitriou as rapporteur. It applies to every debt collected under the Code for Collection of Public Revenues (KEDE), including amounts owed to tax offices, municipalities, social insurance funds and public-law legal entities. The court did not create a blanket immunity for primary residences. It set conditions that the authorities must meet before a family home can be affected.

The Moschato case

The dispute concerns a 162-square-metre maisonette in Moschato, owned in equal halves by the managing director of an industrial company and his wife. The head of a Piraeus tax office (ΔΟΥ ΦΑΕ Πειραιά) started a forced auction to recover overdue company debts of 142,917 euros owed to the state. The managing director's half was included in the auction programme, valued at 100,000 euros, with a first bid set at 80,000 euros. He challenged the programme before the Athens Administrative Court of First Instance, arguing that auctioning half of the home where his family lives breached the constitutional duty to protect marriage, the family and the family home, and the principle of proportionality. The first-instance court upheld his objection. The state appealed, and the Administrative Court of Appeal rejected the appeal as unfounded, finding that the flat was the family's only main home and that he owned other property in several parts of Greece. The state then brought the matter to the Council of State, asking it to overturn the appeal ruling for misreading the Constitution, the KEDE and the Code of Administrative Procedure.

The constitutional reasoning

The court grounded its ruling in Article 25, paragraph 1 of the Constitution, which places the home of individuals under the particular care of the state. For a primary residence, it said, that care protects fundamental human rights under the state's guarantee, and all state bodies are obliged to ensure that protection is effective. The court also relied on the principle of proportionality, which follows from the rule of law. Under that principle, any measure that deprives a person of their home must be shown to be absolutely necessary in the specific case, meaning every other suitable but milder option has been exhausted beforehand, and this must hold at every stage of the procedure. The Council put the core point this way:

Depriving someone of their home must be a last resort and not the authorities' first choice for collecting public debts.

The judges said the protection applies in each specific case and is tested at each step, not only at the moment of seizure.

What changes for debtors

Under the ruling, a debtor can now challenge the seizure at any stage, from notification of the seizure report on the property up to the issuing of the auction programme. Until now, the objection had been accepted only at the initial stage of the seizure report. The argument can, in principle, be raised for the first time when the debtor challenges the auction programme in court. If the objection succeeds on that ground, the programme is annulled and the earlier seizure report lapses. A hypothetical example illustrates the test: a taxpayer owes 20,000 euros and owns a plot of land besides the home where they live. Before turning to the home, the tax office must check whether the plot can cover the debt and, if not, document why it cannot. Only then does seizing the home become possible, alongside the other legal requirements. The amounts in the Moschato case are charted below.