Human Rights and Democracy - Official Documents

the quality of court service. We also supported the Croatian government’s
introduction of a national probation system to reduce prison populations and improve
offender community reintegration. We will undertake similar future projects under
the auspices of the EU twinning mechanism to introduce a probation service in
Croatia and to strengthen their capacity to manage a sexual offender database.
We lobbied hard to achieve comprehensive benchmarks under Chapter 23 of
Croatia’s accession negotiations dealing with the judiciary and fundamental rights.
As a result of this, Croatia is taking steps to ensure it has an independent and
efficient judicial system. For example, the government has adopted new legislation
that strengthens judicial independence and the case backlog has been further
reduced. Croatia is strengthening its fight against corruption at all levels, as
demonstrated by the indictment in December of former Prime Minister Sanader on
corruption charges. Croatia is improving the handling of domestic war crimes trials,
strengthening protection for minorities, and settling outstanding refugee return
issues. The revised constitution now explicitly lists all 22 national minorities and the
government’s self-imposed 2008 benchmark for the provision of 1,400
accommodation units for refugees under its housing care programme has been met.
We also helped to ensure that full cooperation with the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is a requirement for closure of this chapter.
Although Croatia is making progress on human rights issues, work remains to be
done. The EU will continue to monitor these areas in 2011 and in March will produce
a report on Croatia’s progress under Chapter 23. We will continue to support and
monitor this progress and will ensure that Croatia is upholding EU human rights
standards and has met the requirements of the chapter, before agreeing to its
closure.
In Serbia, where minorities remain under-represented in public institutions and
public companies, we funded several election-related and capacity-building projects
to strengthen Bosniak and Albanian minority rights. Among other achievements,
these projects have led to the setting up of an Albanian national minority council and
a multi-ethnic local government in Bujanovac in southern Serbia and more balanced
representation of Albanians in state- and local-level institutions. In 2011 we will
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