2025-12-26
Yevhen Pysmenskyy, Roman Movchan, Oleksandr Dudorov, Dmitriy Kamensky
This article examines the newly adopted Directive (EU) 2024/1203 and its role as a benchmark for reforming Ukraine’s criminal legislation on environmental offenses. The authors analyze key provisions of this document, which set minimum standards for the criminalization of environmental harm, aggravating circumstances, and sanctions. Special attention is paid to the Directive’s requirements for the inclusion of negligent acts, passive conduct, and unlawful actions involving hazardous substances or invasive species. It is argued that the current criminal legislation of Ukraine lacks several offenses required by the EU Directive, with additional gaps identified in the draft Criminal Code. Therefore, aligning national legislation with the Directive’s standards is essential. The analysis outlines key elements that must be addressed, including criminalization of negligent and passive conduct, illegality as a core offense element, and the need for clear qualitative and quantitative thresholds. It emphasizes the importance of establishing liability for incitement, aiding and abetting, and differentiating punishment based on offense severity. The study supports recognizing unlawful handling of hazardous waste as a criminal offense regardless of scale and using property damage as a key indicator of environmental harm. It also finds that current sanctions fall short of the EU Directive’s requirements and should be strengthened by combining imprisonment and fines to ensure fair and effective enforcement.
2025-12-26
Henrik-Riko Held
This article aims to analyse case law associated with cessio (assignment or transfer of claim) during the application of the Austrian Civil Code (Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or ABGB) in Croatian lands. The object of the analysis is decisions of the highest court in the Croatian lands from 1862 to 1945, the so-called Bench of the Seven (Tabula septemviralis). They may be found in the Croatian State Archives (archival fond HR-HDA-394 Stol sedmorice), and selections of decisions have been published in relevant collections and journals of the time. The purpose of the analysis is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of some aspects of the application of the ABGB in Croatian lands, especially taking into account the dynamics between legal norms as defined at the statutory level compared with their realisation in practice. The general context of the analysis is, in addition, the application of the ABGB on the peripheries of the state in which it was created, and its continued application in Croatian lands even after the dissolution of that state.
2025-12-26
Miroslav Šeparović
In the article, the author analyses the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia (Constitutional Court) in relation to the right to respect for the home under Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and Article 38 of the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, focusing on specific issues that have arisen in the recent practice in connection with the demolition of illegally constructed buildings. In determining the existence of "home" and admissibility of restrictions on the right to the home, the ECtHR applies its own interpretative techniques, methods and principles, which it has mainly developed in its case-law. The Croatian Constitutional Court has also accepted this approach of the ECtHR with regard to this right. The ECtHR starts from the autonomous concept of the right to the home. In other words, the existence of a home does not depend on the classification under the domestic law of the contracting states. It is a factual and not a legal concept and depends on the existence of "sufficient and continuous links" with a specific place. In addition to the autonomous approach, the violation of the right to the home requires the application of the principle of proportionality, which also applies to cases brought by individuals living in premises intended for demolition, especially bearing in mind the public interest that exists on the other side. In the article, the author analyses cases in which state’s interferences with the right to respect for the home of persons living in the buildings scheduled for demolition have been examined by the application of the principle of proportionality. The article includes also points of criticism that the ECtHR has suffered due to the (sometimes inconsistent) application of its interpretative techniques and methods.
2025-10-05
Ivana Barać Milovanović
This article studies the effects that the introduction of new family formations has had on children’s rights, specifically the child’s right to know its origin. In order to provide for a systematic and comprehensive answer to the question of whether the child can exercise its right to know its origin in the context of new family formations, the author will start off by making a brief overview of the development of the rights of the child. Following that, the question of how and when the right of the child to know its origin was initially recognized as a universal right granted to all children will be answered. The analysis will further on deal with the specific challenges to which the child is subjected to in the context of new forms of family, primarily in cases of adoption, and subsequently, in cases of families created with the help of MAR procedures. As a result, an outline of the existing and possible approaches towards this issue will be showcased in order to summarize the emerging trends related to the child’s right to know its origin.
2025-07-16
Ranka Jeknić
Based on highlighting “the human rights model” as the latest approach to disability, and presenting various topics and approaches analysed within the framework of contemporary sociology of disability, the aim of the paper is to contribute to gaining insight into the position and problems of people with disabilities in Croatian society. By means of a semi-systematic literature review and thematic analysis of the collected papers, a total of 25 scientific papers published in five Croatian journals in the period from 2007 to 2024 were analysed. The paper describes seven thematic units that were identified through the analysis: living standards and social protection, work and employment, education, independent living, self-perception, attitudes and experiences of parents of children with developmental disabilities, and attitudes of Croatian citizens towards people with disabilities and children with developmental disabilities. Based on the analysis, conclusions were drawn on the situation, problems, and obstacles faced by persons with disabilities in exercising their rights in contemporary Croatian society. Although the International Convention on Persons with Disabilities guarantees the above-mentioned rights and obliges the state to implement them, it can be concluded that the Convention is not fully implemented in practice, and that it is necessary to systematically work on the realisation of the rights of persons with disabilities in Croatian society, as well as to raise awareness and improve knowledge among citizens and to promote social inclusion and interactions with the aim of building a more just, equal, and inclusive society.
2025-07-16
Sunčana Roksandić, Ivan Vukušić
Misdemeanour law, due to its comprehensiveness, always causes certain reservations for the addressees. Given that scientific works largely ignore the analysis of general institutes of misdemeanour law, this paper analyses the aspect of the principle of legality that refers to the principle of certainty of the legal norm in the field of misdemeanour law related to the performance of health care, i.e. violations of the rules of medical practice. Considering the high requirements when formulating the definition of a particular misdemeanour, the paper points to the conditions that must be considered in order to realize the principle of certainty so that the addressees are familiar with the requirements that the legal order places before them and harmonize their behaviour. These aspects are analysed on individual examples from the positive misdemeanour legislation. The principle of certainty, as an institution of the general part of the Misdemeanour Code, is analysed on the example of the protection of patients’ rights through the way of prescribing misdemeanours in regulations of different legal force, which mostly include the responsibility of health care providers if they do not protect patients adequately.
2025-04-29
László Heka
The Hungarian-Croatian state union, which existed for more than eight centuries, was one of the most enduring state formations in European constitutional history before it ended in 1918 with the collapse of the then Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. When the joint state was created, its two members did not lay the legal foundations of the state union, so the conflict that arose in 1848 and the unilateral secession of Croatia (de facto, because de iure the person of the king still connected the two states) created a new situation. The alliance was renewed in 1868 with the conclusion of the Croatian-Hungarian settlement as a compromise solution. It was modelled after the Austro-Hungarian settlement, but some of its provisions offer the possibility of different interpretations, which led to frequent disputes between Budapest and Zagreb. From the point of view of legal comparatists and theoreticians of the state and law, it remains doubtful whether the Kingdom of Hungary was a unitary state, formed a federation with Croatia, or a real union. The heated political debates in the era of dualism (conducted mainly in parliament) could not give a unique answer to that question, and there was no opportunity for an objective analysis in the period between the two world wars and then in the era of socialism. Only the independence of Croatia provided the basis for comparative research by sine ira et studio . In this paper, from the perspective of the theory of the state and law, we analyse the Croatian-Hungarian state law model created on the basis of the Croatian-Hungarian settlement.
2024-12-20
Aida Babović
The amendment to the Family Law of 2023 governed, among other things, the complete deprivation of legal capacity. It was inspired by the Decision and Ruling of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia (UI-394/2015 of 18 April 2023) on the repeal of provision 234, paragraph 2 of the Family Law of 2015, which prevented persons from remaining and becoming completely deprived of legal capacity. The paper observes the implications of the reintroduction of complete deprivation of legal capacity in the national family law arrangement in correlation with the existing partial deprivation of legal capacity. Individual analysis of court decisions of the Municipal (Civil) Courts in Zagreb and Rijeka and the County Courts in Zagreb and Pula indicates the necessary proportionality of the scope and content of deprivation of legal capacity and their practical applicability to the legal status and life circumstances of persons with disabilities. For the sake of comparison, the legislative frameworks of Germany, France, and Slovenia on the protection of adults with disabilities have been brought closer to the Croatian with the purpose of their potential reception and materialisation. In the conclusion of the paper, the assessment, possible solutions and conclusions on the topic of the paper, and projections of its future development are presented with an emphasis on the need to abandon (complete) deprivation of legal capacity in general. In addition, certain de lege ferenda proposals necessary for improving the judicial-procedural and guardianship status of persons with disabilities are presented simultaneously.
2024-12-20
Luka Brajković
The theory of the constitution in the material sense has occupied the attention of theorists of many disciplines for almost two hundred years. Because of its polemical nature and the difficulty of determining what a material constitution in general is, this theory was also considered somewhat controversial, even undesirable for constitutional theory. This essay, following the trend of the European constitutional theory over the past 10 years, which has again become more active in studying this “dangerous” topic, seeks to explore whether the concept of material constitution has any epistemological value for theoretical and practical considerations of constitutional law. Guided by the theoretical principles of Marco Goldoni, as one of the main leaders of the new wave of interest in the material constitution, this essay applies the "material study of constitutionalism" to the Republic of Croatia. In an effort to be a corrective to formal constitutionalism, the inclusion of the material level in constitutional considerations seeks to contribute to further deepening and better explaining of the constitutional reality. The first part, as a theoretical framework, is focused on the material constitution as understood by Marco Goldoni. The second chapter deals with the material inquiry of selected cases from the Republic of Croatia. There are strong indications that the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia in its decisions normatively used some aspects of the material constitution. In the conclusion, the possibilities and limits of both normative and descriptive use of the constitution in the material sense will be considered.