Perspectives of Implementing European Standards in the Serbian Legal System

During the past decade, Serbia has taken significant steps in reforming and transforming her legal system, building and up-grading institutional capacity, harmonizing the national legislation with EU law and efficient implementation of these standards. The research topic of the project will focus on European standards in the implementation process in the legislation, judiciary and public administration and will be concentrated around the following four sub-topics: a) preconditions in implementing European standards; b) implementation mechanisms; c) impediments in the implementation process; d) evaluation. In the specific areas of respective expertise, the project team members will direct their individual research to specific institutions and procedures of relevance for implementation. By exploring the degree of “internal” compliance with the Serbian legal system as a whole, as well as by the level of “external” harmonization of the solution with the European standards and values, the research team will be able to identify the obstacles to implementation and explore ways of overcoming them. The goal of the research is the articulation and presentation of the preconditions, mechanism and impediments, as well as the evaluation of the European standards in the implementation process. Within each research year, a conference will be organized and the research results published and presented on a special web-site.