Procedure for exercising the rights of a person wrongfully deprived of liberty or wrongfully convicted

The Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Serbia provides special proceedings for exercising the rights of a person wrongfully deprived of liberty or wrongfully convicted (Chapter 25, Articles 583-595 CPC). The introduction of such proceedings in the Serbian criminal legislation is a consequence of an enormous number of acquittals, particularly in cases where the defendant has been subjected to the most serious security measure aimed at ensuring presence of the accused person in criminal procedure. These proceedings appeared to be necessary for the purpose of exercising the wrongfully detained or convicted person's right to compensation for damage. In particular, it refers to situations where the final court decision was reversed and the person was acquitted after lodging an appeal for extraordinary legal remedies. In such circumstances, the procedure includes two interconnected stages: initiating an administrative proceeding and initiating court proceedings. Thus, if the injured party does not exercise the envisaged rights on the basis of the submitted request for initiating the administrative procedure, he/she is entitled to initiate court proceeding before the competent court against the Republic of Serbia as a responsible party. By introducing the possibility of exercising the injured party's rights in administrative proceedings, the legislator's primary goal when prescribing this procedure was to ease the courts' workload in handling collective lawsuits. In that context, the aim of this paper is to describe the process of initiating and conducting both phases of these proceedings, and to point out to some omissions in the work of the Damage Compensation Commission in the course of administrative proceedings, which are detrimental to the injured party and directly contrary to the legislator's intention. For the purpose of precluding future omissions, the author draws attention to the main drawbacks of the entire procedure.