Rehabilitation of Persons Convicted for Ideological or Political Reasons and the Role of Public Prosecutor in the Republic of Serbia

Abstract

As an expression of an urgent need to break-up with the past, one can distinguish legal violence, which was committed after the end of World War II in Democratic Federal Yugoslavia. The new communist authorities convicted many respectable citizens by conducting numerous court trials, accusing them of supporting the occupier, after which they confiscated their entire property. In order for the totalitarian past to be legally defeated, it was necessary to create a process by which the historical injustice could be corrected, not only through personal rehabilitation, but also through the restitution of the confiscated property. Fifty years later, when reforms and democratisation of political processes began, Republic of Serbia also faced the consequences of selective and orchestrated justice. The process of rehabilitation and restitution was an attempt, mainly successful, to eliminate the anomalies in the field of final court decisions and their effect. It can be said that the results are significant, but at the same time insufficient. Simple analyses of archived data show that in the period from 1945 to 1952 many more sentences were passed pursuant to the applicable laws in comparison with the number of submitted requests for rehabilitation. The rehabilitation proceedings have shown that those laws were used as a foundation for taking revenge on the previous regimes. The Public Prosecutor`s office in the Republic of Serbia has made a great contribution to establishing legal certainty in this field. To the already wide scope of jurisdictions of the Public Prosecutor`s office, the 2011 Rehabilitation Act added a new obligation: to represent the Republic of Serbia in cases related to rehabilitation. The key question, which is likely to remain unanswered, is whether the proceedings that involved Public Prosecutors rehabilitated those convicted for the most serious criminal acts, who de facto committed those crimes.