The Civic Alliance (CA) welcomes the adoption of amendments to the Law on Free Legal Aid, which:
- provides free legal assistance for the drafting of documents in the administrative procedure to exercise rights from social and child protection, health care and pension and disability insurance;
- free legal aid extends to victims of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
- they recognize persons who request that their stateless status be determined, as well as asylum seekers and foreigners under subsidiary protection.
Since the Civic Alliance has been implementing the project “Provision of free legal aid to asylum seekers, refugees and persons at risk of statelessness in Montenegro” with the support of UNHCR since 2019, we appreciate that the mentioned changes are very important from the point of access to justice for persons enjoying international protection, and who are often unable to participate equally in the procedure due to the language barrier.
However, it remains unclear in what way these changes affect the persons who request to have their stateless status determined in terms of assistance in exercising their rights from social and child protection, health care and pension and disability insurance since these persons often do not have any documents which would testify to their existence, so they are legally invisible in the system.
Also, we believe that assistance to persons who request that their stateless status be determined must, first of all, be based on the full and efficient application of registration procedures in the registry of Montenegro and the procedure for determining the status of stateless persons. To prevent statelessness and protect the rights of these persons, it was necessary to stipulate that free legal aid can also be used for these procedures.
As far as victims of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment are concerned, in 2013, CA in its analysis “Research on the system of free legal aid in Montenegro” pointed out that the law does not explicitly recognize this category of persons, so we welcome the new normative solution.
We also welcome solutions related to the improvement of the quality of free legal aid that will be provided to victims of these crimes, in such a way that free legal aid will be provided to these persons only by lawyers with special knowledge and at least three years of work experience in the bar, in order from the list of the Bar Association.
We note that these persons will have the right to free legal aid in related proceedings as well, by the laws defining governing family and obligation relations and the enforcement and security procedure, but only after it has been established by a final court decision that a person is indeed a victim of torture, inhuman or humiliating treatment or punishment.
Although these changes cover a much wider range of persons who can use this right, the provision of free legal aid in practice is not always at a satisfactory level. Therefore, in addition to the digitization of all procedures for approving free legal aid, it is necessary to strengthen efforts in terms of informing citizens and those who implement the law, so that the adopted solutions are implemented in practice.
We call on the competent institutions to effectively apply this law to provide citizens with effective access to justice and an independent and impartial court, which is one of the basic human rights guaranteed by international legal instruments, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as domestic legislation.
Milena Vujović, Project Coordinator in the Civic Alliance
