LEGAL REMEDIES IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE DISPUTE OF SERBIA
Authors:   University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Law, Serbia, Rapajić Milan 
Published: November 2024

An administrative dispute is a special type of judicial control of the legality of an administrative act. The main subject of an administrative act is its legality. The Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government presented the following reasons in the Explanation of the proposal of the Law on Administrative Disputes from 2009: 1) it is necessary to harmonize the Law on Administrative Disputes with the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia and international standards, especially with the principles and rules of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms; 2) respect for the recommendation of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe - Rec (2004)20 on judicial control of administrative acts; 3) urgent and particularly important harmonization of the Law on Administrative Disputes with the Law on the Organization of the Courts of Serbia from 2008, especially when it comes to the system of legal remedies in administrative disputes; 4) the necessity of changing the system of the Law on Administrative Disputes, especially with regard to the consistent and clear separation of substantive and organizational from procedural issues of administrative disputes.
The Law on Administrative Disputes, although not making the classic division of legal remedies into regular and extraordinary, had a greater number of legal remedies compared to the Law on Administrative Disputes from 2009. Thus, according to the Law on Administrative Disputes, the legal remedies in an administrative dispute from 1996 were: 1) appeal; 2) request for an extraordinary review of the court decision; 3) request for protection of legality; 4) repeating the procedure.
In terms of legal remedies in the Law on Administrative Disputes from 2009, essential changes were made, so the system of legal protection of parties in an administrative dispute was established on a different basis. The first important change consists in the fact that now the administrative dispute is single-stage and there is no possibility to provide for an appeal in special regulations. Also, now only one court is competent to handle all administrative disputes - the Administrative Court. Another change that has been made is the omission of an extraordinary legal remedy, which normally exists in other court proceedings, which is a request for the protection of legality. Instead, it is now provided that the request for reconsideration of the court decision can be submitted by the party and the public prosecutor. In theory, it was noted that the request for reconsideration of the court decision was constructed in a completely different way compared to the previous laws on administrative disputes, including the one from 1996. When it comes to the repetition of the procedure, as another extraordinary legal remedy in an administrative dispute, in relation to the Law from 1996, the established principles have been retained, but certain changes have been introduced, regarding the reasons for using this extraordinary legal remedy.