Description:
Under the auspices of the Regional Research Promotion Programme coordinated and operated by the Interfaculty Institute for Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Fribourg and funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, IDSCS is realizing research project on Europeanization by rule of law implementation in the Western Balkans (WB). Strengthening of the rule of law and the accession to the European Union (EU) have been fraught with difficulties in the WB for over 20 years. In line with previous scholarship on “Europeanization”, this phenomenon is to be understood as a politically driven process, i.e. as a way how EU institutions, rules and policy-making processes impact the legal systems, institutional mechanisms and creation of collective cultural identity in non-EU member states. Hence, the research question of multifactor comparative analysis conducted within this project remains the same: Whether and what kind of influence the EU institutions have on implementation of the rule of law in the WB. The central focus of the research is the reform of the judiciary in the five selected case study countries (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia). From this basic analytical framework, a subset of more concrete research questions follows: what are EU requirements developed in the monitoring process? Which organizational-institutional reforms have been made? Which gate-keeper elites resisted against these reforms? Who (critical civil society actors) supported these reforms? What have been the effects and how did they change over the last decade with regard to independence, responsibility, efficiency, effectiveness benchmarks? By focusing specifically on the area of judiciary, the main findings of this research project will be:
a) specification of the conditionality criteria for the EU accession in the field of the rule of law, and
b) policy recommendations for future institutional settings in the WB countries.
Project started in January 2012 and will last for 18 months. It will be supervised by prof. Florian Bieber and prof. Joseph Marko.
Project Team is consisted of:
Project Coordinator: prof. Zoran Ilievski
Scientific Coordinator: prof. Marko Kmezic
Researchers: Gresa Caka (Kosovo), Adaleta Bibezic (Montenegro), Sanja Kmezic (Serbia), Vladimir Misev (Macedonia), Adnan Kadribasic (Bosnia and Herzegovina)