22 GOGITIDZE AND OTHERS v. GEORGIA JUDGMENT Interests and Corruption in the Public Service, was deprived of any real value. The confiscation of the applicants’ property had therefore been justified by socio-legal and economic considerations, namely the need to eradicate corruption and to return the illicitly acquired property to the lawful owners or, in the absence of such, to the State budget. 86. As to the proportionality of the confiscation, the Government argued that that requirement was satisfied by the fact that the civil dispute between the State and the applicants had been the subject of a comprehensive judicial review by an independent and objective court. However, the applicants had failed to prove, in the relevant judicial proceedings, that they had had legal incomes that were sufficient to enable them to acquire the property, which had a much higher value. In this connection the Government also stated that, given that the impugned confiscation represented a measure to control the use of property within the meaning of the second paragraph of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, the respondent State enjoyed a particularly wide margin of appreciation in the context of the policy of fighting such a major crime as corruption. 2. The applicants’ submissions 87. The applicants’ submissions were mostly aimed at criticising the political and legal reforms undertaken by the Georgian Government in general, accusing the ruling forces of anti-democratic methods of governing and of adjusting the law, including the legislation on confiscation, to their own whims. 88. With regard to the subject matter of the present case, the applicants confined their arguments to complaining about the major constituent elements of the administrative confiscation procedure as such. In particular, they stated that the confiscation of their property had been arbitrary, the authorities having claimed that it had been obtained as a result of the first applicant’s corrupt activities, without first having a final conviction against him proving his involvement in the commission of the impugned activities. In that regard they stated that the first applicant had been convicted of the offences with which he had been charged on 25 August 2004 (see paragraph 9 above); the launching of that criminal case had acted as a spur to the initiation of the administrative confiscation proceedings, as late as January 2010, that is, five years after the confiscation order had become final (see paragraph 36 above; no copy of the first applicant’s conviction was submitted). The applicants also complained that the burden of proof in the confiscation proceedings had been shifted onto them, arguing that, according to the general principles of criminal procedure, it was always the public prosecutor who should carry the burden of proving a defendant’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt. 89. The applicants also argued that the confiscation of their property had not been a provisional measure but, on the contrary, an irreversible act,