Donor: FRESTA – Peace and Stability Secretariat of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Duration of project: May 2001 – September 2002
The Project “Support to Reform of the Justice Sector in Serbia” was the project of the Danish Institute of Human Rights (DIHR), which started in May 2001 and is sponsored by the Peace and Stability Secretariat (FRESTA) of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project was carried out in cooperation with the two relevant Serbian Ministries: the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Justice and also includes support to two local NGOs: Belgrade Centre for Human Rights and Belgrade Child Rights Centre (Yugoslav Child Rights Centre).
The launch of the project was preceded by a pre-appraisal and identification phase sponsored by FRESTA. The Danish Centre for Human Rights (DCHR) was responsible for the overall project management and monitoring, and also provided substantial advice on the methodology and planning tool used as the foundation for the project. Execution of the project was carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the Ministry of Justice and Local Self-government of Serbia (Ministry of Justice), respectively.
The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights has continuously functioned as an independent sparring partner to DCHR on the project and has served as a base for DCHR activities at the initial stage of the project. The Director of BCHR, Professor Vojin Dimitrijevic, participated in the work of the Think Tank on elaborating a vision document on reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Besides, BCHR functioned as a valuable sparring partner for the process ensuring clear, independent and reliable information to DCHR’s interpretation of the local, social and political context. DCHR’s experience was that in order to sustain reform on state level the presence of NGOs as sources of independent critical knowledge was crucial.
The fact that the project built a bridge between government perceptions of the vision for a justice sector reform and inputs from civil society gave the justice reform process the needed legitimacy and creates the necessary room for dialogue thereby providing a broadly founded reform process. BCHR had throughout the project period been a source of invaluable independent information and critical knowledge enabling DCHR to take the right decisions, getting access to the right people and providing the credibility to their proposals needed in order to have the right point of departure for the consultations with the ministries.
The long- term objective of the project was an overall reform of the justice sector of Serbia, which implies strategic interventions in which the DIHR contributes in terms of strategic thinking, law reform and coaching of the planning process. The medium-term objective was to develop and implement a rolling strategic planning system into the ministries that can support and function as a management tool for implementation of the reform programmes.
The project contains four elements of support or pillars: (1) vision process for reform of the Ministry of Interior; (2) vision process for providing framework for judicial reform anchored in the Ministry of Justice; (3) human rights information activities provided by the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights; (4) law reform on Juvenile Justice by Belgrade Child Rights Centre.
