Updated: January 26, 2024
Majority of business in Serbia have had experience with the commercial courts, thus strenghtening of comminercial justice in Serbia will significantly affect the businesses experience with the judiciary. The MDTF-JSS team prepared the Commercial Courts Needs Assessment to ensure informed policy development in commercial justice.
The commercial justice has limited resources to ensure timely and quality services to the business sector. ICT and automated cases management system is outdated, while equipment is not adequate across the CCs. Distribution of human resources does not ensure equal burden of judges. In 2021, the lowest average caseload per judge was in the CC in Zajecar with 321 cases, concurrently in Belgrade judges received triple as much or 919 cases on average. The Infrastructure conditions vary, but in majority of buildings there is need for reconstruction, especially of the archive, registry offices, but also court rooms and cabinets.
This analysis has identified seven challenges that the commercial justice system in Serbia faces, hindering its ability to administer commercial justice efficiently, timely and and with the desired level of quality. These challenges encompass a range of issues, such as procedural inefficiencies, limited resources, outdated legal frameworks, and difficulties in case management. The main challenges include bankruptcy cases as labyrinth of inefficiency, right to a trial within a reasonable time that burden the system unreasonably, commercial offences as criminal law in commercial courts, enforcement cases that still occupying 1/3 of total workload of commercial courts, limited use of ICT, lack of specialization, upholding of multiple court locations has impact on dispersion of resources.
