THE PROJECT CONTINUES TO SUPPORT THE CASE LAW HARMONISATION

The project "Support to the High Judicial Council" (hereinafter: Project) continues to support the advancement of the key mechanisms tackling the case law harmonisation process in Serbia. The activities build upon the previous EU support successfully implemented through “Judicial Efficiency” and "Support to the Supreme Court of Cassation" projects, during which the electronic case-law database was developed and implemented.

The database, which contains decisions of the Supreme Court of Cassation, four appellate courts, the Commercial Appellate Court, the Administrative Court, and the Misdemeanor Appellate Court, has two instances:

• Public instance, available to citizens (https://sudskapraksa.sud.rs) that contains anonymized decisions
• Internal instance, available to judges (https://sudskeodluke.sud.rs) that contains integral decisions

As such, the database has a dual role - to acquaint the professional and other public with the practices of these courts, but also to enable judges and assistants to effectively follow the practice of their court and the court of the same or lower rank.

The search form of the case-law database allows users to set specific criteria for searching and filtering decisions in the database, i.e. to select particular type of court, specific legal matter or to choose the descriptor which best resembles the essence of the decision (e.g. „termination of employment contract”, “division of property acquired during the marriage”, “silence of the administration” etc.) from the database catalogue. The courts whose decisions are in the case law database have adopted catalogues of descriptors (List of Descriptors) that correspond to the legal areas from their jurisdiction.

In addition, decisions can be searched by the occurrence of specific term in the text of the decision (full text search - similar to Google). This way, even the people not formally educated in law, can easily get acquainted with the practice of Serbian courts in specific legal circumstances.

In the previous period, the Project actively supported the inclusion of decisions of the Administrative Court (AC) in this database. A very detailed List of Descriptors (legal institutes and terms) from the jurisdiction of this court was adopted and about 200,000 decisions, which the AC had in its old database, were transferred into the case-law database and redistributed based on the descriptors. The Project Legal and IT experts trained over 100 judges and judicial assistants of the Administrative Court, in the court seat and in the regional units of the Administrative Court in Novi Sad, Kragujevac and Niš, for using the case-law database. Previously, the project trained the AC administrative staff to upload decisions to the case-law database and migrated legacy decisions of this court to the new case-law database platform.

Another achievement that adds to the case-law database are more than 40 decisions of the Supreme Court of Cassation and appellate courts cross-linked with the translated decisions of the European Court for Human Rights from the eCASE database of the Judicial Academy, allowing both judges and citizens to explore the decisions of the domestic courts which are related to ECHR decisions.

Currently, the database contains decisions of the following courts:

•   Supreme Court of Cassation (13,085 anonymized decisions)
•   Appellate Courts (73,970 integral and 4,220 anonymized decisions)
•   Commercial Appellate Court (14,557 integral and 1,974 anonymized decisions)
•   Administrative Court (165,570 integral and 9,553 integral anonymized decisions)
•   Misdemeanor Appellate Court (5,874 integral decisions)