Legal Remedies in Criminal Procedural Law in the Republic of Macedonia

Abstract

Macedonian criminal law legislation was subjected to some serious reform resulting in a nearly novel Law on Criminal Procedure (Official Gazette 150/10) adopted on 18.11.2010 with a suspended enforcement as of December 2013. This new law transformed domestic criminal procedure from a so-called mixed neo-inquisitorial procedure into a fully adversarial, thus almost fully abandoning the investigation principle and the court paternalism accompanying it. Court investigation was cancelled with trials now being held in an adversarial proceeding through cross examination of the defendant, witnesses and expert witnesses by the parties. Constrained by time, the legal reform failed to introduce practically any important novelties in the area of remedies, so this field went without any significant change compared to the former LCP of 1997. Hence, it must be acknowledged that not only in Macedonia, but throughout the entire Western Balkan region, the reform of criminal procedure legislation pays very little attention to remedies, their redefinition within the context of the parties, the emphasized adversarial concept, including the equality of arms of the parties, the scope of the remedies, the grounds underlying the remedy, the hearings before the second-instance court, etc. Practically speaking, this led to the preservation of the remedy system from the LCP of former Yugoslavia. The Macedonian system of criminal proceeding contains the following remedies: -Ordinary: appeal to a first-instance judgment, appeal to a second-instance judgment, complaint to a decision. -Extraordinary: Motion for the protection of legality; motion for extraordinary review of an effective judgment, and motion for a re-trial. The reform has made a small rationalization of the remedy system in the sense that the extraordinary remedy entitled ‘Extraordinary mitigation of the sentence’ has been taken out.