And the bodies of the Croatian Parliament remain silent about the problems of court experts

I cannot fathom why no government in the last 26 years has wanted to align the fees for court experts, which today are only a tenth of what lawyers receive (according to the tariff). I also asked the president of the Croatian Society of Court Experts and Appraisers (HDSViP) Melita Bestvina, our regular reader, if she has any knowledge of the reason for the silence of both right and left governments regarding their appeals, but she could not tell me. The association also addressed the Croatian Parliament, but since Croatia is formally a parliamentary democracy, and in reality, the Government controls the parliament, the Parliament merely echoed the silence of its mistress – the Government of the Republic of Croatia. Now the experts want to inform Brussels about everything.

I have written about this problem, so some may think there is no need for me to repeat myself. However, there are extreme situations, and I believe this is one of them, when a person practically has to annoy the authorities and tell them: ‘Come on, people, correct this mistake already, this is no longer normal.’ I especially think this needs to be written about again because HDSViP sent a request for access to information on January 10 of this year, asking why the working bodies of the Parliament (the Committee for Human Rights and National Minorities and the Committee for Petitions and Complaints) have not responded to the previous request for the leaders of that association to be addressed. However, there is no response to the request for access to information, and it is questionable whether there will be one, as Bestvina recalls the recent statement by MP Mirela Ahmetović, who criticized parliamentary bodies from the podium for not providing answers even to the MPs.

Prime Minister’s Word

Bestvina also recalls the words of Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, who in mid-August last year (after HDSViP sent him a letter in June) said that the Ministry of Justice and Administration is aware of the issue and that it needs to be resolved. And then a typical bureaucratic game begins in which the Ministry announced that the problem faced by court experts would be resolved by the end of 2023 (it has not been resolved), regardless of the planned adoption of the Law on Court Experts, and the minister recently stated that it would indeed be resolved by adopting that law. This is further postponement, believes Bestvina, of a problem that has not been resolved for a quarter of a century! The law should regulate a number of existing unregulated rules of communication between courts and experts, all according to the Guidelines on the Role of Court Experts in Judicial Proceedings of the Member States of the Council of Europe, which Croatia adopted in 2015.

However, according to the updated Activity Plan of the Ministry of Justice, the draft proposal of the law should be sent to parliamentary procedure by the Government in the first quarter of this year. A working group has been formed, which had its first working meeting in September 2023, and no meeting has been convened since then, and given that the last month of this quarter has just begun, it seems that nothing will come of it. Especially since elections are approaching, probably in the second quarter of this year. However, it seems that waiting for the Law is just pouring from the empty into the void because, as Bestvina says, the problem can be solved by aligning the regulations that address this issue – with the Law on Courts. The proposal for that regulation was, however, on e-consultation which ended on January 8 of last year, and after receiving 865 comments, it has not been adopted to this day.

After the Elections, Nothing New

Because of all this, HDSViP has sent a request to parliamentary bodies (as well as to the Ombudsperson, from whom there is also no response yet) to inform the parliamentary representatives about everything. But as I have already mentioned, what is known to everyone is that in Croatia, the Parliament does not control the Government, but the Government controls the Parliament, so this is probably also the reason for the silence of parliamentary bodies. The members of HDSViP have long since lost their patience, and they announce that they will have to present their problem to the responsible committees of the European Commission and the Council of the EU. Let them do it because after 26 years of proving something that is obvious, there is no point in waiting for elections anymore because, to repeat, both the left and the right are equally uninterested, so it does not matter to court experts who will be the next prime minister and minister of justice and administration.

POST SCRIPTUM

I would just like to remind once again about the fees for court experts. In 1998, they had the same value of the working hour as lawyers and court interpreters. The latter have seen their fees increase over the years, and since October 2022, lawyers’ hourly rates have been raised to 99.54 euros gross (excluding VAT), while court experts are still allowed to charge clients 9.29 euros per hour, as they were determined 26 years ago.