Reforma pravosuđa sa stanovišta afere "Indeks"
The Reform of the Judiciary in Serbia as seen in the context of the "Index" Affair

Summary/Abstract: The „ Index" was first used as the name of the undercover criminal police investigation of the corruption at Faculty of Law in Kragujevac in 2006. For the first time an undercover agent had been used in a criminal proceedings in Serbia. The investigation has been presented to the public on January 20th and 22nd 2007, when 11 professors of Kragujevac Faculty of Law have been put in custody under charges of accepting bribes and abuse of their official status. Once the names of the professors were presented to the public, the police action became the „Index" affair. The Public Prosecutor's Office in Smederevo indicted 41 persons, including 20 professors of the Faculty of Law in Kragujevac, on August 17th 2007. In March 2008, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Smederevo indicted additional 47 persons that were witnesses in the initial proceedings, charging them with offering bribe and acting as an intermediary in bribing, thus raising the total number of persons indicted to 88. The author meticulously analyzed the subsequent trial, demonstrating that „a theater of judiciary obstruction", which begun with an illegal merging of the trials, took place eventually. He concludes that the trial in the „ Index" affair clearly proves that there can be no efficient reform of the judiciary without a fundamental reform of the procedures, efficient mechanisms of expert monitoring and possibility of criminal liability of the judges.

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