Committee
for Human Rights
16000
Leskovac
office:Svetozara
Markovica br.37
tel/fax:+381
16 215 922
www.humanrightsle.org
e-mail:nesic@eunet.rs
Leskovac, 24 January 2010
THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN LESKOVAC ON THE
HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION REPORT IN JABLANICA AND ONE PART OF PCINJA DISTRICT FROM
THE ASPECT OF UN DECLARATION ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ACTIVITIES OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE PROTECTION AND AFFIRMATION OF THE SAME RIGHTS IN 2009
The Committee for Human Rights was asked for legal help or advice by 602 people or 54 a month on average. These people found out about the Committee work from the media, their friends or acquaintances, our former and current users or on our website, and they presented written documents containing their problems.
From the total number of people who asked for our help 542 of them came directly to our office whereas 11 people contacted us by telephone and 49 by letters.
Within the reporting period 568 people addressed us with the cases from the area of our interest and monitoring, and 34 people with the cases that are not from the field of our interest.
In the cases from the area of our interest 564 people got legal help whereas 16 people asked for legal help from the area which is not of our interest.
Within the reporting period 568 people asked for and got legal advice for the cases which are the subject of our interest while 34 people asked for and got legal advice for the cases which are not the subject of our interest.
In the reporting period 107 cases were taken into consideration for representation whereas 96 cases were represented by us.
For the needs of our users we wrote 27 complaints, 5 investigation demands, 2 criminal complaints, 55 complaints, 26 charges, 2 suggestions for the process repetition, 2 appeals for review, 28 requests to the EU Court in Strasbourg, 2 petition requests of different kinds, 1 appeal for the permission to carry out the sentences, 1 objection to indictment, 7 objections to complaint, 2 demands for the access to the information of public interest and 4 constitutional complaints.
Committee for human rights lawyer represented our users in 145 appearances in court in lawsuits and in 72 court appearances in criminal charges proceedings.
The national structure of people who asked for our help and legal advice is as follows: Serbs – 575, Gypsies – 12, Albanians – 5, Bulgarians-3, Croatians-2, Muslims- 2, Iraqi – 1 and Macedonians-1.
During the reporting period we
visited prisoners on several occasions in the prisons in
On two occasions we visited our clients in the prison Zabela and once in the prison in Sremska Mitrovica. The prisoners who were served their sentences in the prison in Sremska Mitrovica had no complaints about the treatment while the clients from the Zabela prison complained about difficult and cruel conditions in the pavilion 7 where the clients are kept in isolation for several months in the sections with great supervision, allegedly for their personal safety.
The structure of the rights that were violated or endangered for the people who contacted us in 2009 is from the aspect of UN GA Declaration on human rights, as following:
- Article 1 of the UN Declaration, the right to equality and dignity- 1 case
- Article 3 of the UN Declaration, the right to life, freedom and personal safety – 9 cases
- Article 5 of the UN Declaration , prohibition of torture, inhuman humiliating treatment or punishment – 32 cases
- Article 7 of the UN Declaration, the right to be equally protected without being discriminated - 177 cases
- Article 8 of the UN Declaration , the right to be protected by national courts from violation of basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the law – 83 cases
- Article 10 of the UN Declaration, the right to a fair trial before an impartial court and within a reasonable period-196 cases
- Article 12 of the UN Declaration, prohibition of arbitrary interference in personal and family life, residence or correspondence - 6 cases
- Article 17 of the UN Declaration, the right to possess and enjoy personal property- 253 cases, depriving the property by municipal authorities, monopoly companies and not paying people’s claims by courts in the executive proceedings.
- Article 23 of the UN Declaration, the right to work and have satisfactory work conditions - 108 cases
- Article 25 of the UN Declaration, the right to having a satisfactory living standard- 1 case
By analyzing the numerical part of the report we can see that there is the continuity of violating the rights to efficient court protection, Article 8, and the right to a fair trial, Article 10 of the Declaration. This is due to the fact that the Ministry of Justice is led by a woman who has never been known in the legal circles either as a theoretician or as a practical worker, which means that being a total layman she does not seem capable of understanding the problems in the legal system, not to mention solving them. Instead of solving the problems by establishing the mentality of the righteous trials, she arms courts and in this way shows that she is not capable of protecting the integrity of judges and judicial system by trust and respect, and may be that she is not familiar with the same. Another fact of great importance is that legal administration was completely privatized by December 2009 and under the direct control of oligarchy groups both on local and republican levels where the carriers of judicial positions instead of applying the laws used ‘unregulated private justice’ in the interest of oligarchs and their own, while the country had a role of the ‘masochist adapter’ who organized and financed a huge market of the judiciary and police gangs which traded human freedom, property and destinies freely, without any kind of responsibility and totally relieved of any fear, since the country which had chosen and paid them had no control but was a passive observer of the events on the market of people` s destinies.
In December 2009, at the end of the reporting period, the actual government did what other governments should have done but did not for 9 years. Namely, the actual government had strength to undertake the reform of the justice system by replacing the majority of corrupted judges involved in the organized criminal, with some admissions when some great experts were also replaced. The sound base was made for the creation of the system of values, the affirmation of fair trial principles by which the integrity of the courts and judges is more efficiently protected than in the system where court buildings and judges are protected by the armed court guard and the police. What is most important is that now we have a sound base for making legal, and consequently the property safety, which is fundamental to the progress and functioning of a civilized country.
It was noticed that the reforms in the justice system were most criticized by individuals and groups which either made the contribution to the chaos in the justice system or supported and used such a state which was the result of the fact that the state had not established the efficient system of responsibility for causing the chaos in the justice system. The carriers of functions in the justice system who caused the state, the people and the legal persons to grieve and compromised the state as being one of the most corrupted and legally and property most unsafe states in the civilized world, were not trialed. The current authorities have a very difficult task to fulfill; to establish and affirm the principle of responsibility, first of all of those who made the chaos in the system of justice of the Republic of Serbia, maintained it and used it widely for their own benefits and the benefits of the oligarchic groups supporting them and to which they gave accounting instead to the state, and all this to the disadvantage of the state budget, legal persons, most of all economic entities and citizens who were made a bare subject to domination in order not to allow the repetition of the previous chaotic state. We will witness the establishment of such a principle when we make sure that judges are capable of putting other judges on trial or prosecutors and other holders or ex-holders of the functions in the system of justice with no fear or responsibility of any kind, pursuant to the order from the Final notes of 29 July, 2004 of the United Nations Committee for Human Rights, section: C/9” for the Republic of Serbia.
The disastrous condition in the justice system was contributed by the so called Supervisory board of the Supreme Court of Serbia which was not capable of performing and neither did perform the function determined by the Law on judges and the Republic Public Prosecutor` s office which depreciated the institute of the Protection of Legality.
The system of justice was particularly compromised in the case of the complaints made by thousands of “war veterans” who were not paid their wages by the state for taking part in the war in 1999. Their complaints were regularly rejected for being so called “absolutely unauthorized” although the courts in Vranje accepted hundreds of such complaints in 2002 and 2003 and refused the objections of the state that courts are not authorized to arbitrate in such proceedings. What worries most is the fact that the First Municipal Court in Belgrade rejected hundreds of such complaints for being “absolutely unauthorized” on the basis of the attitude taken “as stated in some records taken at the proceedings and not based on the direct oral and public proceedings as asked by the Article 1 regulation, protocol 1 of the European Convention and the regulation of Article 32, item 1 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, which means that the state, with its direct influence on the courts, prevented hundreds of citizens to have their rights decided by the independent and judicial court, based on hearings, thus violating their right to a fair trial.
A more concerning fact is that European Court
of Human Rights in Strasbourg, after applications were submitted by reservists
and after the visit of Minister for European integrations and Vice President of
Serbian Government Bozidar Djelic,
assumed an attitude towards the necessity of constitutional complaint as an
effective legal means, which is a condition for addressing to European Court
and which made the lawyers, who write the applications to the Court in
Strasbourg, and legal publicity suspect that Serbian lobbyists have a direct
influence on the Court in Strasbourg and thus shake credibility of that court
in the eyes of Serbian people. Therefore, an illogical situation was created,
in which OEBS mission, the European Commission and Office for EU Integration do
their best to get European institutions closer to Serbian people, while
European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, by making constitutional
complaint effective as a condition for addressing to European Court, discredits
European institutions and interferes into Serbian internal affairs, which is
not its duty. Therefore, the following question comes up, if Republic Serbia in
the regulation, article 22, paragraph 2 of the constitution, does not condition
addressing to the international institutions, by submitting constitutional
complaint, and Constitutional Court itself does not state that it is not
Jurisdiction Court in the legal system of Republic of Serbia, which implies
that the constitutional complaint is not jurisdiction legal means, for the
Court considers it that way. If such a Court decision is the result of the
political agreement with Serbian authorities, which implies that a great number
of applications against Serbia should be turned down by all means in front of
Court, which also refers to Court attitude towards the case of Vucko Manojlovic against Serbia,
we are all witnesses of the greatest discrediting of European Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg in its history, which turns the institution authorized for affirming legal judging from
the article 6 of the convention into the mercenaries of the state, which is the
job of the most prominent NGO in the field of Human Rights in the world. It is
a sad description of Court and judges. To conclude, there was not a legal
security for natural and legal persons in
The numeric part of the report
determines that in 2009, we continuously and at high levels received calls from
the people whose right to property and enjoyment of property was injured, from
the article 17 of the declaration, there were even 253 users, which specially
refers to taking away the property from the people by municipal government as
well as the state monopolist firms through the regulation, article 84,
paragraph 2 of the Constitution, which forbids monopoly, unless the law allows
that for the state monopoly firms in the filed of energy, telecommunication and
similar, and if there is not any legal protection for the right property of the
citizens by Courts, especially not in accordance with the regulation, article
1, Protocol number 1, with European Convention of Human Rights protection,
concerning the fact that domestic constitution in the article 58 under the
Right for protection protects individual property right, which is a narrower
notion than the right to property, acknowledged and protected by the article 1
of the Protocol1, number 1, with European convention. The special emphasis is
on the unwillingness of courts to provide adequate protection for the right to
property, not only in terms of direct threatening the property but also in
terms of unwillingness to charge efficiently and fast property demands of the
people in the enforcement proceeding, which causes the legal and property
uncertainty of Serbian people on one hand and on the other hand implies the
fact that majority of cases against Serbia at Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg are for injuring right to legal trials according to the article 6 of
the convention as well as injuring the right to property. From the previously
said, we can draw a conclusion that there was not property safety in
By analyzing the numerical part of the report we determine the third position for the people who called us for help and advice in terms of violating right to work and satisfactory working conditions of the employed from the article 23 of declaration, there were 108 cases, as a consequence of the unfinished privatization, lack of strong system of Union organizations, bad work of inspection services and courts which do not provide effective court protection to people whose rights are either injured or threatened.
The reporting period, at
relatively low but continuous monthly level, determines violating the ban on
torturing, cruel, inhuman or humiliating behaviour or
punishment from the article 5 of the declaration. We are pleased to conclude
that political tortures are minimized, while there is an increase in torturing
prisoners in the Penal Workhouse in
These cases are more complicated due to the well known fact that UN Human Rights Committee, in concluding remarks of July 27, 2004, in the report of Republic of Serbia on the condition of human rights, under the number 13 of concluding remarks, explicitly required that Serbian authorities process all these and similar cases, as the state has not done so and has not provided Committee with court orders and work on these cases let alone reports or any other data. This also refers to its new report which was submitted to the Committee in 2008 and which will be discussed early in 2010.
The question is whether
authorities of
The reporting period marks just 9
cases of violating the right to life and freedom from the article 3 of
Declaration. The special attention should be drawn to the case of Vucko Manojlovic from Leskovac, being sentenced in Penal Correctional Institute
in
The Committee lawyer brought
charges against President Tadic at Municipal Court in
The case, marked as urgent
according to the article 5, paragraph 4 of European Convention for Human Right
protection and basic freedom, has been at European Court of Human Rights in
In 2009, Committee cooperated and still cooperates with Amnesty International, UN Committee against Torture and UN Committee of Human Rights, in the cases important for practical implementation of human rights, acknowledged by the declaration of UN General Assembly on human rights as well as the supporting act such as International Covenant on civil and political rights and UN Convention against tortures, cruel, inhuman and humiliating behaviour and punishment.
The reporting period marks the
violation of the rights from the article 1 of the declaration, article 12 and
article 25, but at negligible level, which cannot be the sample for relevant
conclusions, concerning these rights on the territory we focus on and generally
in
We are worried by the fact that public is not familiar with not a single case of the application of the law on liability for violation of human rights, as it is, and related to the concluding remarks of Committee of Human Rights from July 29, 2004, section C/9.
Only by implementing concluding remarks on setting up the responsibility system for those ones violating human rights directly or indirectly, mentioned above, will Serbian authorities show that human rights became inevitable part of the government awareness and behaviour.
Te report has been done in 11 months due to the fact that Committee staff was on holiday in 2008.
President of the Committee for Human Rights in Leskovac
Dobrosav Nesic