On November 5, 2018, North Macedonia’s Anti-Discrimination Commission issued a ruling regarding former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who had left office almost three years earlier under a barrage of allegations concerning state capture, corruption and illegal wiretapping.
The Commission at the time was led by Aleksandar Dashtevski, who has been nominated to a string of public posts by the centre-right VMRO DPMNE formerly led by Gruevski.
The Commission found by majority vote that Gruevski’s right to a fair trial had been violated by a Skopje court in several court cases against him that year. The discrimination, it said, was “based on [Gruevski’s] personal and social status” as a former prime minister and VMRO DPMNE leader.
Gruevski was facing a two-year prison sentence but never showed up to serve it. On November 13, eight days after the Commission’s ruling, he took to Facebook to announce he had fled to Hungary and would seek political asylum from authorities under his close ally, Viktor Orban. A week later, asylum was granted.