Illustration: Canva

The Autonomous Women’s Center is among the signatories of the position paper that civil society organizations are addressing to the public and Serbian institutions regarding the announced amendments to the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code, and the Law on Juvenile Offenders. The signatories warn that, in the context of a deep political and social crisis, the Government lacks the legitimacy to implement comprehensive changes to key criminal laws, especially with a minimal deadline of 20 days and a non-transparent consultation format (submitting comments via email without a public presentation of the proposals).

“This procedure opens the door to further repression, suppression of freedom of expression, weakening of victim protection, and erosion of public trust in institutions. We demand that the Ministry of Justice withdraw the proposed laws until genuine transparency, institutional legitimacy, and public trust are ensured—conditions that can only be met after free and democratic elections,” the document states.

“We also call on the European Union not to allow such a process to be used merely for box-ticking within the Development Agenda.”

The proposed amendments to the Criminal Code dangerously expand criminal repression: they criminalize typical protest tactics such as road blockades, thereby undermining the right to peaceful assembly; introduce a vaguely defined offense of publishing material, which could be arbitrarily applied to journalists, activists, and citizens; risk downgrading serious acts of rape to the lesser offense of “sexual intercourse without consent,” contrary to the spirit of the Istanbul Convention and to the detriment of victims; and by defining “malicious computer program,” they abandon objective criteria and introduce the need to prove subjective intent, jeopardizing legal certainty.

At the same time, the amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code affect over 200 articles, making it impossible, due to the short timeframe, to seriously assess the impact on the existing level of rights. The proposed solutions shift the burden of informing onto victims, relativize the status of especially vulnerable witnesses, expand secret surveillance from exception to rule, broaden the scope of deferred prosecution, and eliminate the possibility of investigating unknown perpetrators. The draft Law on Juvenile Offenders further lowers the previously achieved level of child protection by narrowing the mandatory jurisdiction of specially trained justice officials and abolishing the mandatory appointment of legal counsel ex officio for child victims. Moreover, the draft is inconsistent with Directive 2012/29/EU and Serbia’s obligations under the Chapter 23 Action Plan.

We demand:

• The immediate withdrawal of the proposals from the legislative procedure.
• The organization of a genuine public debate, with a public presentation of the proposals, sufficient time for discussion, the inclusion of experts as well as interested communities and individuals, and a written report that, according to national regulations, must be published after each public consultation—in line with EU standards and practice.
• Consideration of the positions of the National Convention on the EU.
• Rejection of the proposed solutions that expand repressive powers, undermine victim protection, and diminish legal certainty.

The full content of the position paper is available HERE.