On 26 April 2022, face-to-face lectures were resumed at the Faculty of Law at the University of Sarajevo after an interruption of two years due to Covid-19.
The IRZ was represented by attorney Dr. Stefan Pürner, Head of Section for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Northern Macedonia and Serbia.
The latter gave an opening lecture on the development of civil justice in Germany with a special focus on mediation as an option that is increasingly used for alternative dispute resolution.
The attendees also included lawyers, so that aspects of practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina were also discussed. The participants from academia and practice engaged in an interesting round of questions and lively exchanges after the lecture.
Over 100 participants from the judiciary and the bar association and junior staff took part in the online seminar "Current Issues in Property Law" on 30 and 31 March 2022. The seminar focused on various issues of real estate case law.
IRZ organised the event with the Centre for the Education of the Judiciary and the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The speakers included
Dr. Larisa Velić, Dean of the Faculty of Law in Zenica
State Attorney Ismet Velić and
Goran Nezirović, Judge at the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
The practical relevance of this event was ensured, as the participants were able to submit questions from their own work in progress, which the speakers addressed in their presentations. Participants also asked questions or commented on the legal views presented in the chat during the ongoing events.
A number of legal problems were addressed during the event which the case law of Bosnia and Herzegovina solves differently in some certain aspects These include the inadequate documentation of legal relationships to land in the past, the former Yugoslav titular property form of "social property", and questions of succession to former state property within the framework of the various levels of the complicated state structure in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It became apparent that the frequent, uncoordinated legislative changes in the area of law of property raise many competition problems. It is therefore no surprise that the event ended with an intense discussion, during which court decisions and statements from the scientific literature were also quoted extensively.
In view of the abundance of disputed legal issues and the economic importance of the topic, further training measures are required in this area to standardise case law and thus increase legal certainty.
A new translation of the German Criminal Code into Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian has been published by the IRZ, with an introduction written by the Research Director at the Institute for Eastern Law in Regensburg, Prof. Dr Dres. h.c. Friedrich-Christian Schroeder.
The book is part of a series of publications with translations of German laws into the languages of the partner states in South Eastern Europe, which are intended to strengthen the role of German law as an orientation law in legal transformation. The Minister of Justice of Northern Macedonia, Prof. Dr. Nikola Tupancheski, himself a professor of criminal law and a member of the local expert commission for the reform of the criminal code until he took office, recently confirmed the important role of the publication.
The translations are not only used to inform groups of experts working on draft reform laws, but are also used by scholars researching on comparative law, practitioners working across borders and students. They are also a popular tool for learning German legal terminology.
