Finally, after three full months, the so-called of the strike of lawyers in Serbia, more than eight thousand of them, the Ministry of Justice started negotiations according to a more normal system than the one that a month and a half ago the young minister described in a show: "The very top of the legal profession was in front of me."
Therefore, a Working Group was established which should, as expected, prepare proposals for amending the Law on Public Notaries and a set of other related laws. All of this should be completed by Monday, December 22, when the Assembly of the Bar Association of Serbia should declare what has been achieved. Hypothetically, if the lawyers were to adopt the proposal, it would be appropriate to - it would not be the first time, after all, there will be another pre-New Year's discussion on the budget - changes to the instructions to the Assembly of Serbia; this time justified by urgent procedure.
NEGOTIATORS: That the lawyers are serious is already shown by their three-member "negotiating" team: there is Jasmina Milutinović, president of the Čačka Bar Association, Mirjana Jovanović Tomić and Tanja Arsić, lawyers from Novi Sad, all three excellent experts in civil law.
On the other hand, the ministerial working group includes Čedomir Backović, assistant minister for European integration and international projects (the only one who does not have a direct relationship with notaries), Nela Kuburović, assistant minister for justice and a newly-passed (June this year) public notary to which is, of course non-partisan, a possible future career, and professor Dejan Đurđević, director of the Republic Secretariat for Legislation.
Nela Kuburović certainly has the experience to work in the Working Group. As soon as she passed the bar exam - after two years of internship at the First Municipal Court in Belgrade - she joined the Ministry of Justice in 2008 as an adviser "for providing professional assistance to the High Council of the Judiciary", during the ministry of Snežana Malović, so that, as soon as it was established, In August 2009, the administrative office of the High Council of the Judiciary, headed by Nata Mesarović, was employed in the Sector for Normative Affairs. Since May 2013, she has been promoted to head of the Department for Status Issues of Judges at the Supreme Court of Justice. The rest is history: today she is in the Ministry where she started and heaven knows where she will end up, from a consultant for professional assistance (with two years of internship) to former reformers of the judiciary, an assistant to the current ones, to a notary public...
Dejan Đurđević, today a professor, ties his career to Professor Oliver Antic, he was his assistant. Together with Antić, at the time of the passing of the Law on Notaries, he held those famous specialist studies on notaries at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade, on which many today's unelected notaries spent considerable money; in vain, because it did not bring them any advantage. On the contrary, it turned out that Antić and the others in the commission (Professor Dragor Hiber, Marija Draškić...) passed the notarial exam with difficulty, and then in the new commission with Đurđević and the "team" the criteria were lowered, the regulations on passing were changed and that - in the end - it was the candidates of that second committee who, with rare exceptions, were appointed among the initial 94 notaries (today only 92), despite this which is expressly stipulated by law that the Chamber of Notaries must be founded - in letter and number - by at least one hundred (100) appointed notaries.
Lawyers prof. Đurđević is called the "ruler from the shadows", when it comes to notaries.
GIZ AND TWO BROCHURES: Despite the objections to his participation in the Working Group, perhaps that is not a bad thing: it is certain that he is better versed in the matter than the "lawyer unifier" Minister Nikola Selaković, and the bazaar says that he is seen as Selaković's successor. But there are two more details: in May of this year, the brochure "Notaries Public - Who they are and what they do" was published. On 30 pages, exactly prof. Đurđević wrote eulogies about notaries as "the pinnacle of the judicial profession", all of which were printed in 60.000 copies and distributed to courts, local governments, etc. The publishing partners (read: financiers) were the Ministry of Justice, the EU, the World Bank also participated, but above all GIZ, the German Organization for International Cooperation, whose main client is the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Sometime in October of this year, the same GIZ is trying to get out of the whole story with notaries, after the lawyers joined the protest and after it was shown how horrible the whole idea of a monopoly is, today there are only 92 notaries who work to the detriment of lawyers and citizens in their jobs. In those October days, a meeting of GIZ and notaries was scheduled, at which the first month of the notary's office in Serbia would be talked about, I guess, commendably: the German ambassador who was supposed to open the meeting canceled his participation, and soon the meeting itself was canceled without explanation. .
Since then, until today, silence, except that last Saturday in "Blic" you could find a brochure with the same title as the one from May. The author is the same, prof. Đurđević, the content also, except in three details: the opening words of the president of the Chamber of Notaries, Miodrag Đukanović (he is the one who in a recent interview with "Danas" did not answer even one of the five questions asked!), and the published price list of notary services and names, offices and phone numbers of notaries in Serbia; aside from the fact that notaries - as well as lawyers, after all - are prohibited from advertising. There is another difference: this time, only the Chamber of Notaries appears as the publisher, there is no more GIZ, nor the EU. The circulation is, by the way, 162.000 copies, on 42 pages and another four pages of the cover, which advertises GIZ's slogan: "responsibility, safety, efficiency".
When asked by "Vremena", both GIZ and the German Embassy remained silent. In translation: they wash their hands of the scandalous introduction of the notary system in Serbia.
THEIR FACTS: They themselves, for example, announced on the GIZ-Program for Legal and Judicial Reforms website, under the title "How to standardize the practice of notaries public", that: "In the three months of work of notaries public in Serbia, a number of disputed issues arose in connection with by applying the Law on Public Notaries. That was enough time to clarify the most common questions, and the Chamber of Public Notaries, with the support of the GIZ Program for Legal and Judicial Reforms, organized workshops for public notaries in Belgrade on November 13, 14 and 15, 2014, in order to meet with experts discussed how to standardize the practice of public notaries."
On the same website, there is information about numerous events that GIZ and its program, among others, have realized with the Ministry of Justice. For example, "The Notary Chamber of Serbia hosted a workshop of notary chambers from the region and Europe on November 7, 2014, held in Belgrade", and "GIZ Program for Legal and Judicial Reforms organized from August 27 to 29, 2014 workshops for newly appointed public notaries, the first after their appointment on August 1, 2014".
Apart from the information about the first brochure from May this year, which is available on the website (almost identical to the one from a few days ago, except that GIZ obviously washes its hands of the latter), there is another interesting piece of information from last May, 2013.
It is a symposium entitled "The role of public notaries in the improvement of legal transactions in the Republic of Serbia" and the question "What and what will be the competences of notaries public in Serbia?", which was organized by GIZ's Project for Legal Reform in the Republic of Serbia in partnership with the Ministry justice.
The information on the GIZ website states that the amendments to the Law on Public Notaries from February 2013 expanded the competences of "future public notaries to a considerable extent", so it is specified: real estate transactions are already one of the defined competences of notaries public, but they are needed expand more.
RECOMMENDATIONS AND REFUSALS: The conclusions of the symposium - and almost all of them, except for the fact that the parliament has a major normative activity of harmonizing more than 20 laws before the start of the notary's work - were translated into those nocturnal changes to the Law on Public Notaries from the last night of August 2014, in which the authorities listened only GIZ's pearl, the need that "notaries public can do many tasks not only as entrusted tasks, but also as tasks from the original competence".
Lawyers were the first to warn about the role of GIZ in all this confusion about notaries. We will see if the authorities will finally start harmonizing the laws that they did not harmonize before the start of notary work, if these negotiations will bear fruit, if they will restore business ability and the right to free will when concluding contracts.
In any case, get ready for private enforcers: they are being talked about in parliament these days, and their introduction was supported and the educational process carried out for years by (i) GIZ.
And GIZ should clearly answer the questions put to it. Because, according to their claims, they have been in Serbia since 2001 and will remain until 2018. If they continue like this in the judicial sector, both the EU and the rule of law will be just imaginary nouns for us.
