THE VENICE COMMISSION AND ITS DEALING WITH SERBIA

Abstract

This contribution is on the Venice Commission, its mission, functions, composition, funding and procedure. In the latter part of text the rather abstract provisions of its Statute are illustrated by the elementary data on its proceedings in some cases involving Serbia. The Venice Commission, officially dubbed European Commission for Democracy through Law, is an advisory body to Council of Europe, although from its founding in 1990 it have been able to include states – non members also. Its original task was to help the democratic transition in the ex-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe providing them with legal expertise and advisory help useful for development of a democratic nation’s legal and political institutions. Accordingly, its founders were conceiving it as a temporary, ad hoc body with limited term of its office. But it soon became clear that development of democratic institutions was a continuous process having no definite time framework: moreover, it was evidenced that this process is by no means limited spatially also on the „new democracies“ in the East, but it concerns the states with much longer traditions in working democratic bodies and more firmly established rule of law. After only two years, the Venice Commission had become a permanent body of CE. All founding states were members of CE, but they included three distinct groups regarding the working of their democratic institutions: a)states with firmly rooted, developed, routinely workable and stabilized democratic institutions (France, Sweden); b) states that made a successful transition from an authoritarian into a democratic order in relatively recent past (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and c) states yet faced with lack of efficient democratic institutions and/or troubled internal condition (Turkey, Cyprus). States from all these groups have had a lot of its own highly specific experiences in framing and working democratic institutions and legal guarantees for them to offer to and share with the nascent East European democracies. Occasions in which the Venice Commission had dealt with questions relating Serbia may be grouped into three separated wholes: a) protection of the human rights in Kosovo; b) legal guarantees of State Union Serbia and Montenegro to protection of human and minority rights, and c)reforming the legal system of Serbia as an independent state.