The project “Support to the Implementation of the Strategies for IDPs, Refugees and Returnees – Legal Aid”, financed by the EU under the IPA funds, has been extended to June 2015, ensuring not only the continued provision of legal aid to refugees, internally displaced, and returnees in series of cases already initiated at various institutions and courts, but also launching and solving the new ones.
This project is a continuation of the previous two-year “Further support to refugees and IDPs in Serbia” project, implemented from 2010 – 2012, and is aimed at improving the provision of legal assistance and increasing the access to timely and accurate information necessary for realisation of the rights of returnees, IDPs and refugees in Serbia.
Legal expert teams based in Belgrade, Niš, Kraljevo, Kosovska Mitrovica and Gračanica provide free legal aid in the most efficient manner to internally displaced persons from Kosovo, refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to returnees in a process of readmission.
These offices manage to bridge the gap between Serbia and Kosovo: court summons and judicial notices from Kosovo are being swiftly delivered despite the malfunctioning of standard postal services between Serbia and Kosovo; judicial deadlines are being complied with; lawyers and clients travel safely to and from Kosovo so as to attend the court hearings.
Project leader Massimo Moratti defines this as a “legal aid shuttle” – the situation when clients requesting legal assistance are not located on the same territory as their assets and claims, or a situation that calls for different skills and standards in order to successfully represent a case.
Since December 2012, the project has represented cases before the Constitutional Court of Kosovo and hundreds of cases in lower and higher courts in Kosovo, as well as provided legal aid to more than 1200 individuals interested in the process of privatisation of state-owned enterprises in Kosovo.
The project has received over 5,000 cases, out of those 1,000 are solved and 4,000 are pending before the competent authorities. The project has also helped in obtaining necessary documents for returnees under the Agreement on readmission – as of April 2014, as many as 500 requests (90 percent) have been resolved in favour of clients.
“Many of cases initiated before the courts last for numerous years, even seven or eight years, that’s why it is necessary that representation in these cases continues without break,” Moratti says.
“This is a concrete help that the EU provides to IDPs and refugees currently living in Serbia”, adds Moratti and specifies the requests mostly concern property restitution.
” The goal is to promote systemic changes, that’s why besides in court representation in the courts of Kosovo, we aim at strategic litigation cases as well. ”, Moratti says.
This year, the Office won its first case in Institutional Court of Kosovo: the Court ruled that a woman of Serbian nationality who fled from Kosovo was denied her human rights, and ordered the Kosovo Property Agency to implement its previous decision and return the illegally seized property to her.
“The project also provide legal assistance to returnees from readmission in obtaining their documents in Serbia and thus facilitating their integration in Serbia sot that they would avoid seeking asylum abroad.”, Moratti says.
More information about the project can be found here.
Read project success stories here.
