The participants of the training course were the presidents and judges of the basic, high, and commercial courts from the territory of the Belgrade appellate jurisdiction, as well as the advisers in the State Attorney’s Office.

Mrs. Nataša Plavšić, Ph.D., the Deputy State Attorney and the Agent of the Republic of Serbia before the European Court of Human Rights, spoke to the participants of the training course about the notions of a reasonable time and the right to a trial within a reasonable time, while Mrs. Snežana Andrejević, retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Cassation, presented the criteria for appraisal of the length of proceedings and the right to a fair compensation.

The participants also had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the local cases in which the standards of the European Court of Human Rights had been applied, which were presented by Mrs. Ljubica Milutinović, Justice of the Supreme Court of Cassation and the Deputy President of the Supreme Court of Cassation.

Ms. Sonja Prostran, the leader of one of the components in the USAID Rule of Law Project, spoke about the Instructions for Improvement and Promotion of the Procedure of Conclusion and Enforcement of Out-of-court Settlements in the proceedings for the protection of the right to a trail within a reasonable time, which was, with the support of the Project, and at the initiative of the State Attorney’s Office, signed in July last year.

The application of the Instructions has yielded excellent results up to now. The E-juris application of the Judicial Academy (the database of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in the Serbian language), was presented to the participants by Aleksandar Stojanović, the Head of the Documentation and Information Centre of the Judicial Academy.

The next and the last in a series of such training courses will be provided on 20 March in Belgrade, also in the Supreme Court of Cassation.