Donor: The Balkan Trust for Democracy
Duration of the project: September 2008 – October 2009
This project was linked to the endeavors of the Belgrade Centre aiming at re-training of judges and other legal professionals in Serbia and the region, which is one of the main activities of the Centre and prerequisite for establishing the rule of law in the country. The quality of the Court’s judgments, however, depends not only on the abilities of the judges of the Court, but also on the professional legal staff which assists them in their work. The legal officers working in the Court provide the backbone of its operation, as they review each case submitted to the Court before it comes to the judges, and as they assist the judges in legal research and the drafting of all of the Court’s judgments and orders.The aim of the project was to support the (ongoing) judicial reform in Serbia by providing the advanced training in specific areas of human rights to the legal officers of the Supreme Court of Serbia thus improving the quality of their judgments and the efficiency of the Court. During 14 months of the project duration ten two days seminars were organized for all of the legal officers working in the Civil, Criminal and Administrative divisions of the Supreme Court of Serbia. The lecturers were the most distinguished human rights experts in Serbia. The programme of the seminars was defined in cooperation with judges of the Supreme Court of Serbia and Judicial Training Centre. Lectures have been involved in-depth examinations of the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and its repercussions in Serbian law and practice. Programme consist of the general course on the application of international law, and most of all the relevant international human rights treaties, within the domestic legal system with main focus on the Constitution of Serbia and on its direct applicability, and on the rules it sets out for the application of the rules of public international law by Serbian courts. Specific attention was given to the right to a fair trial under Article 6 (requirement of reasonable length of judicial proceedings) as undue delays are still a systematic problem within the Serbian judiciary and are the object of a great majority of applications to the European Court of Human Rights and the right to effective legal remedy under Article 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Specialized courses were on criminal proceedings, focusing on Article 5 of the European Convention, which prescribes rules on the lawfulness of detention on remand and other forms of deprivation of liberty, right to property, as enshrined in Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the European Convention and the freedom of expression, as enshrined in Article 10.
