ZAGREB, April 10, 2018 – Amendments to Serbia’s legislation on national councils will contribute to weakening and not strengthening the institutional status of national councils – bodies representing national minorities, the president of the Croat National Council (HNV) Slaven Bačić said according to Croatian language media in Vojvodina, Serbia, on Monday.
Serbia’s ministry of state administration and local government called citizens and experts to familiarise themselves with the text of the bill amending legislation on national councils of national minorities and to submit their proposals, suggestions and comments by April 18.
Bačić believes that the biggest problem lies in the proposal to “depoliticise national councils.”
State bodies propose that in future “members of national councils cannot be in political party management bodies, such as a party president, member of the presidency, executive committee, and the like.”
“This rigid limitation in Serbia’s legal order isn’t foreseen for any other elected body, from the president to local government, considering that the highest state representatives in regional and local government bodies can be members of political party bodies,” Bačić said among other things. He added that this was in contradiction to the “elementary presumptions of the democratic election process: minority councils are elected at elections and every election process is political and the fundamental stakeholders of the election process are political parties.”
Bačić underscored that a large number of national council representatives expressed their objections to the bill because it is logical to expect minority parties to participate in elections for minority councils and their most prominent members to be councillors if they so wish.
“For comparison’s sake, in Croatia that would mean that members of bodies of the Independent Serbian Democratic Party would not be able to be members of Serb national minority councils. That sort of limitation does not exist either in… Hungary, where Croats and Serbs have their minority government bodies from the local to the state level,” Bačić said and added that the HNV would continue to object to the amendments.
The law on national councils was adopted in 2009 in Serbia’s parliament. It defines that national councils represent national minorities in the areas of education, culture, information in the language of the national minority, and official use of language and script.
