SERBIA: THE LAWYERS' COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (YUCOM)

 

THE LAWYERS' COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (YUCOM)

The Lawyers’ Committee For Human Rights (YUCOM) was founded in 1997 as an expert, voluntary, non-governmental organization whose members are legal experts engaged in promoting and advocating for the rule of law and compliance with human rights, raising public awareness, conceiving, establishing and leading civic initiatives, providing legal assistance to victims of human rights violations, as well as developing co-operation with national and international organizations involved in human rights’ protection and promotion. YUCOM is renowned as an organization advocating for human rights and promoting the active participation of citizens through legal initiatives. It has profiled itself and gained much recognition as a human rights defender organization.

Today, YUCOM, as a member of numerous ad-hoc coalitions, has both the capacity and an extended experience in successfully leading campaigns for the reform of legislature and legal practices. YUCOM continues, by means of active and constant public appearances along with public support that it gains through its work, to successfully impose a reference frame for the system of values and standards that contributes to confront the past and implement a transitional justice and the rule of law. In addition, YUCOM is highly engaged in representing other NGOs in cases against NGOs, with the aim to assist the development of more elaborate and efficient mechanisms for the protection of human rights defenders in Serbia.

During its 20 years of existence, YUCOM’s Legal Team has been constantly and successfully providing legal assistance to victims of human rights violations before relevant national bodies and courts, including the Serbian Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee. On an annual basis, YUCOM provides free legal aid to more than 1000 citizens as well as numerous legal advices and runs a database of users and cases’ status. YUCOM has also developed a quality control technique and will offer it to other free legal aid providers.

YUCOM currently represents human rights defenders and organisations that are subjects to attacks, such as activists of Woman in Black, Youth Initiative for Human Rights and many others.

YUCOM has also shown a strong commitment in setting limits for freedom of expression in order to overcome racism and intolerance in Serbian society. In that respect it had successfully advocated for hate speech incrimination, conducted a research focusing on the implementation of laws on the media l related to their responsibility to promote tolerance and ban discrimination and hate speech and it also led numerous hate speech’s cases in front of the courts. YUCOM cooperates with various civil society organizations providing and protecting human rights in Serbia.

The main achievements related to human rights advocacy are the adoption and implementation of a number of important laws, including the Amnesty Law in 2000, Free Access to Information, Law on Educational system (2009), Law on Ombudsman, provisions on family violence (2014), the introduction of hate crime into Serbian legislation in December 2012 and many others.

In respect of Chapter 23 of the EU negotiation process covering judiciary and fundamental rights, YUCOM is a founder of the National Convention on the European Union – NCEU, with European Movement of Serbia. YUCOM is leading the Working Group of NGOs for Chapter 23 as part of the Human Rights House portfolio. Within the Working Group that YUCOM coordinates, more than 50 organisations are actively engaged in specific topics, depending on their expertise.

In 2011, YUCOM formed the Human Rights House Belgrade. HRH Belgrade along with four prominent CSOs became a member of the Human Rights House Network, based in Oslo, Norway.

(More info at: https://en.yucom.org.rs/yucoms-cv/)