Serbia Flouts Victims' Reparation

Rights, Report
Sandra Orlovic, director of Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, HLC, said
their new report showed that "for the vast majority of victims... the right to reparations
guaranteed by international conventions that Serbia signed is unattainable.
"There is a huge gap between Serbia's obligations and the rights that victims are
trying to realize," Orlovic said.
The HLC report is based on the Centre's experiences in representing victims to the
Serbian courts.
Orlovic says Serbian institutions are "not interested in the victims no matter what
ethnic community they come from.
"In this issue of the rights of victims to reparations, we can clearly see the relation of
[Serbian] institutions towards our recent past," she said.
One problem is that Serbia's current Law on the Rights of Civilian Invalids of War
does not recognise many categories of people as civilian victims of conflicts.
Among those are missing persons and their families, victims of sexual violence and
torture, people with mental health issues and people whose disability level is below 50
per cent.
People who died or were injured at the hands of members of the Serbian armed forces
in other countries are also not included.
They can only seek reparations by suing the state of Serbia.
According to the HLC, there have been several hundreds court cases so far.
But these proceedings are very protracted and usually take more than 10 years, Relja
Radosavljevic, HLC law expert, said.
Another problem, he added, is that the courts reject the vast majority of the
compensation claims.
This is either because courts refuse to establish a link between Serbia and the crimes
committed, despite the evidence they have, or because of discriminatory
interpretations of the statues of limitation, Radosavljevic explained.
As a rule, courts do not believe victims and their testimonies, he added.
On the other hand, they entirely accept the testimonies of the people who committed
the torture.

Dzevad Koldzic, whose mother was among 16 Bosniaks from Serbia's Sandzak region
killed in 1992, is among those excluded from the current law.
He has been seeking reparation from the courts ever since, unsuccessfully.
The state turns a blind eye to us and has never asked us [relatives of these killed]
anything even though they [the victims] were all Serbian citizens. I hope we will
manage to show that we are not second-class citizens, Koldzic said.
The HLC and the Centre for Advanced Legal Studies in Belgrade prepared a "model
law" in April that would set out the rights of civilian victims who suffered during and
in connection with armed conflicts from 1991 to 2001.
The model law was put forward after the Ministry of Labour, Veterans and Social
Affairs proposed its own new legislation. NGOs severely criticised this, arguing that it
did not uphold victims rights and urging the government to withdraw it.
The law is supposed to be passed in the coming months, however, Labour Minister
Aleksandar Vulin has said.