Sacked Serbian Prosecutors and Judges to Return to Offices

Serbia’s public prosecutors and judges who were fired during the 2010 justice reform will be reinstated in the upcoming days, the Ministry of Justice said.Hundred and twenty-two Serbian public prosecutors and their deputies will be officially readmitted to the Association of Prosecutors on September 22, and two days later they will be back to their offices, the Ministry of Justice announced.

“The agony of the prosecutors has finally ended after 33 months. There will be no more systemic corruption in our state were politics is intertwined with the justice system, “ said Nikola Selakovic, the Justice Minister.

“The prosecutors need to be completely independent in their work and not consult politicians on what they should do,” he added.

Additionally, 303 judges who were also fired in 2010, will return to the courtrooms in the upcoming months.

Selakovic says that there will be no new reforms of Serbia’s justice system, but the negative aspects of the previous one will be annulled.

The Constitutional Court of Serbia has overturned in July the decision of the state commissions in charge of judicial reform to sack number of judges and prosecutors.

The process of reforming the corpus of judges in Serbia began in 2008, when the Judicial Council was tasked with assessing the country’s entire quota of judges, about 3,000 in all, re-electing only those it deemed suitable.

The process finished in January 2010, by which time more than 800 of the 3,000 had lost their jobs.

Majority of those rejected then either appealed to the Constitutional Court in Serbia or the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg.

International institutions and local legal specialists have been severely critical of the reform process.