Administrative Appeal in Serbian Law
This paper addresses the issues of concept, features and place of the administrative appeal in Serbian administrative law. Special attention is given to the relation between administrative appeal and judicial review of administrative acts. The paper is part of a wider analysis regarding the effectiveness of administrative appeals in the framework of administrative justice on European level, put forward at the EGPA Conference in Toulouse in 2010. The paper is limited to scrutiny of normative aspects of administrative appeal, with the intention to be followed by an empirical research on its effectiveness.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Ombudsman Between Administrative and Judicial Appeal Procedures
In recent years a lot of attention has been paid to enhancing and strengthening the role of the Ombudsman in complaints procedures; an equal (or larger) amount of attention has been given to lowering the threshold of formal – administrative or judicial – appeal procedures or to simply creating more and broader legal protection mechanisms. From a legal point of view a strict distinction has always been made between the complaint of a citizen against ‘unfair’ treatment by the government and the appeal lodged by the citizen against an ‘illegal’ administrative decision. In this context it’s surprisingly easy to think of ‘complaints’ and ‘appeals’ as ‘black’ and ‘white’ categories thereby leaping over the grey area in-between. But it’s exactly this grey area which is of particular interest not only to the citizen – who very often finds such legal distinctions incomprehensible – but also to the legal community – whose primary interest should be fair adjudication. This paper has a dual focus: on the one hand we wish to study effective adjudication in administrative proceedings, on the other hand we want to examine the position of the Ombudsman visa- vis these administrative proceedings. Problems as described above are common to most countries that have well-developed (or over-developed) legal protection mechanisms. Complaints and appeal procedures are not – contrary to popular belief – parallel tracks but rather are separate tracks of legal protection which can and do intersect at some points in time.
La motion de méfiance constructive communale : un acte justiciable du Conseil d'Etat
Il y a quelques mois, le legislateur wallon a reconnu aux conseils provinciaux et communaux le pouvoir de voter une motion de mefiance constructive a l'encontre de tout ou partie du college provincial ou communal. Ce nouvel instrument de controle politique n'a pas tarde a etre mis en œuvre. Rapidement, les mandataires desavoues ont saisi le Conseil d'Etat. Par deux arrets rendus il y a peu (publies ci-apres, respectivement p. 324 et p. 326), la juridiction s'est declaree competente pour connaitre de cette categorie d'actes. Analyse et perspectives.