Title:Anti-corruption Mechanisms in Practice
Language: Serbian
Year: 2013
About 66,500 refugees and 206,000 internally displaced persons currently live in the Republic of Serbia. About 3,000 people were returned under the Agreement on Readmission and according to the estimation of the Council of Europe, and 50,000 – 100,000 more will be returned, not including about 20,000 displaced Roma, who have never been registered.
Discrimination against members of these four groups is evident in the field of education, social and health insurance as well as labor relations.
Activities within the project Antidiscrimination mechanisms in practice, which YUCOM performed in 2012, tended to improve the situation of persons included in the above-mentioned groups, in order to enable them to fully enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the Law on Prevention of Discrimination and thereby support establishing effective anti-discrimination mechanisms.
The project is the result of the need for a more profound promotion and monitoring of anti-discrimination mechanisms in the legal system of Serbia, through the analysis of court practice, independent state institutions and non-governmental organizations.
The conclusions and recommendations, which this publication contains, are the result of activities performed within the project, as well as activities that YUCOM had performed in the previous period. There were held six focus groups with representatives of target groups, as well as non-governmental organizations that work on the protection of their rights, and the aim was to identify the causes of discrimination in terms of members of vulnerable groups, identification of the most common problems they experience in everyday life.
On the focus groups, the legal framework for protection against discrimination was presented and procedure in case of violations of the rights and experiences of countries in the region and the EU were simplified to citizens of Serbia.
Furthermore, in order to examine the mechanisms for protection against discrimination provided by the Law, requests for free access to information of public interest were sent to all the basic courts in the Republic of Serbia and based on the response it has been created statistically analytical section cross-section of the court proceedings in this area. Analysis of procedures in front of the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality have also answered on our question about work efficiency and importance of this institution.
Finally, there were performed more than twenty interview, semi-structured interviews with representatives of state authorities on local and national level, with representatives of the academic community, as well as with media representatives. The study included both the efficiency of the existing legal framework and other measures to prevent discrimination against these groups.
