4 November 2022 - President Dr Šeparović spoke today at the Symposium marking 25 years of entering into force in Croatia of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In his address at the Rijeka Law Faculty, which together with the City of Novi Vinodolski organised the event, he outlined a genesis of the application of this international treaty by the Constitutional Court of Croatia, emphasising its important role in transposing the Convention and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in the Croatian legal system. He addressed several examples where the Constitutional Court has had to broadly interpret the Constitution and the Constitutional Act on the Constitutional Court in order to be able to follow the jurisprudence of the ECHR, like trial within a reasonable time, extension of detention, deciding on the costs of proceedings that preceded the constitutional adjudication etc. In his final remarks he pointed out that the Constitutional Court is well aware of its dual role, first as the highest Croatian institution that supervises the application of the Convention within the national framework, and second, as only one of the "national courts" over which the ECHR supervises the application of the Convention. Deputy President Dr Snježana Bagić and Judge Lovorka Kušan discussed other aspects of the Convention's impact on the jurisprudence of the Croatian Constitutional Court.
