On 6 November 2007 the European Court of Human Rights rendered a judgment in favor of Mr. Zoran Lepojic, who was represented by the legal team of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, finding that Serbian courts violated his right to freedom of expression. Namely, Mr. Lepojic, who was an official of the Demo-Christian Party of Serbia, was convicted of criminal and civil defamation of the Mayor of the Babusnica municipality, for publishing a critical newsletter article during an election campaign. The Serbian courts reasoned that public officials should enjoy greater protection of their honor, reputation and dignity than ordinary Serbian citizens. When, during the course of the judicial proceedings, Mr. Lepojic point out to the domestic courts that such reasoning is completely at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights and the jurisprudence of the European Court, the presiding judge rebuffed him by stating that the “European Community does not live in Serbia.” (It should be noted that the European Court of Human Rights is a court of the Council of Europe, an organization of which Serbia is a member and over which it presided in the past six months, not a court of the European Community or the European Union).
The European Court established that by doing so the Serbian domestic courts unjustifiably restricted the freedom of political speech in Serbia, and awarded Mr. Lepojic 3.000 euros as compensation for moral damages. The European Court has thereby shown that Europe can indeed live in Serbia, and that Serbian citizens can protect their rights in Strasbourg, if not in Serbia itself. The Court also decided that Serbian citizens do not have to exhaust the so-called request for the protection of legality before applying to Strasbourg, finding that this remedy is ineffective in and of itself, since it depends on the discretion of the public prosecutor. Bearing in mind the fact that the European Court dispenses with a vast number of cases on inadmissibility grounds if the applicant has not exhausted all effective domestic remedies, this conclusion of the Court is of great importance both for the reform of the Serbian legal system and for future applicants before the European Court itself.
