Standpoints of the European Court for Human Rights best explain the importance of executive procedure. ECHR also said that enforcement of court decisions should be treated as the constituent part of elementary human right to fair trial in reasonable time. Therefore, the system of bailiffs was the real need, not a phase for fulfilling of European criteria.
Since establishing of the institute of bailiffs in our legal system, enforcement of verdicts has improved, so, finally, fairness has a full sense, which explained all relevant data. Although 52 bailiffs were planned, currently 29 of them are operational. Some of them cover municipalities and have more than 20.000 cases and have collected more than 35 million EUR. Even the deadline for payment of services has been reduced on which indicated Law on bailiffs, which prescribes that decision on proposal for bailiffs shall be made no longer than five days since the day of submitting of proposal. However, previous work showed specific failures in work of bailiffs, although we do not want to undermine previous positive effects in their work.
Namely, although Law on bailiffs is clear that decision should be delivered to executive debtor, what often happens is that executive debtors finds out that the account is blocked due to settling of debts, at the time when accounts is already blocked. Also, due to ignorance or because they are not familiar, executive debtors often immediately finish imposed obligation, which is perhaps baseless even though they have the possibility of complaint. Lately, we have a lot of similar examples. Article 47 of the Law on Bailiffs says that the objection may be filed on decision on enforcement, decision on rejection, or the on rejection of the proposal for enforcement, within five days since the day of reception of decision. Complaints have to be submitted to the court or to bailiff who decided on the proposal for enforcement. Bailiff is obliged to submit the case file to the court, within five days for the purpose of deciding on objection. We note that the reasons for filing the complaint are as follows:
1) court or bailiffs who made decision on enforcement is not competent; 2) document, which is the reason why the enforcement took place, has no elements of executive title; 3) decisions on the basis of which the execution is assigned is not executable; 4) decision on the basis of which is determined by the execution was canceled, revoked or modified; 5) settlement on the basis of which the execution is assigned annulled; 6) deadline for the settlement of claims has not passed or not the condition is determined by the settlement; 7) execution is determined at things, payment claims and other rights that are exempt from execution or where the possibility of execution is limited; 8) the claim is terminated on the basis of facts that occurred after the enforceability of the decision, or before that, but at the time when the execution debtor could not highlighted in the proceeding that encourages executive document, or if the credit is abolished based on the fact that occurred after the concluded settlement 9) judgment creditor postponed the fulfillment of obligations for the time that has not yet expired; 10) the time-limit in which, in accordance with the law, it may propose execution; 11) the claim is not transferred to the enforcement creditor or the obligation is not transferred to the judgment debtor.
Also, bailiffs in practice make one more failure in complying with the Law. When appearing in media, bailiffs still violate the Law on protection of personal data as they still delivered identification number of debtors, on which Civic Alliance has already pointed out, and was confirmed by Agency for protection of personal data and free access to information. Chamber of bailiffs has also been informed about everything.
We hereby invite the Chamber of bailiffs, which within its competence, especially when it comes to control of work of bailiffs, to examine these allegations; Ministry of Justice as an umbrella institution that closely monitors their work, to apply the Law without hesitation and revoke licenses to those bailiffs who work opposite to the Law. Although the Chamber has an obligation to control work of bailiffs at least once a year, we invite them to intensify controls and act preventively at the same time.
Although this is one of manners of informing citizens about this institute, whose work they do not know quite well, we invite Ministry of Justice and the Chamber of bailiffs to improve activities in the part related to informing citizens about their rights, related to bailiffs. This law has to be respected fully in order to be implemented appropriately, and bailiffs are the ones who have to be the best example.
Zoran Vujičić
CA, Cooridnator of the Rule of Law Program
