Authentic Interpretation of the “Law” on the General Staff – Triple Legal Violence
The authentic “interpretation” of a special “law” for the General Staff, adopted under urgent procedure by the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and Legislation, constitutes a threefold act of legal violence and, instead of strengthening the rule of law, reinforces the construction of a lawless state.
Transparency Serbia therefore calls on Members of Parliament not to adopt this authentic interpretation and calls on the Constitutional Court to decide on the submitted initiatives without delay, so that such erosion of the constitutional order can be stopped.
The adoption of any authentic interpretation is problematic for several reasons. First, this instrument is not recognized in the current Constitution of Serbia, raising questions about the validity and effects of authentic interpretations adopted by the National Assembly on the basis of the Law on the National Assembly and its Rules of Procedure. An additional problem is that neither the parliamentary law nor the parliamentary rules contain any limitations or criteria governing the adoption of authentic interpretations. As a result, it has often happened that MPs “interpret” provisions that are completely clear or do so in a manner entirely contrary to the original meaning of the norm. Due to this issue—and especially because of the authentic interpretation of the term “public official” in the Law on the Prevention of Corruption, which was entirely unfounded and highly harmful—Transparency Serbia submitted an initiative to the Constitutional Court back in the summer of 2022, but no decision has yet been made.
Regarding the proposal of the authentic interpretation of the law on General Staff, it is problematic for the same reasons as the law itself, as well as for several additional ones. To recall: aside from the fact that adopting special laws for individual projects is a practice that undermines the unity of the legal system, in this case an additional step has been taken in building a lawless state.
Namely, it is evident that the special law for the General Staff is unconstitutional, since the Assembly has, through it, declared null and void an individual administrative act. This violated one of the fundamental principles of the Constitution, the principle of separation of powers, because the Assembly assumed the jurisdiction of the judiciary and/or the executive.
The proposed authentic interpretation concerns the same matter—only now it expands the number of administrative acts the Assembly seeks to annul, because it is evidently the case that MPs of the ruling majority were in such a hurry to adopt this law as quickly as possible that they did not even manage to familiarize themselves with all the acts they wanted to overturn in order to push through this project at any cost.
In addition, by “interpreting” a norm that refers to an area bounded by the streets Kneza Miloša, Masarikova, Birčaninova, and Resavska, the interpretation annuls a decision relating to a significantly wider area—providing further proof that this is not an interpretation of an existing norm, but the annulment of yet another administrative act.
An authentic interpretation must be adopted by the same majority required for the adoption of the law itself, which raises the question of why the MPs of the ruling majority did not propose an amendment to the law rather than an authentic interpretation. The reason may lie in the effect of an authentic interpretation, which is retroactive. On that basis, it can be concluded that the authorities have already undertaken certain unlawful actions and now seek to legalize those abuses.