The Unification of Laws in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia

Sa？etak This article provides a special look into the Yugoslav Kingdom from the standpoint of the creation and enforcement of law. Soon after the proclamation of the single Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1 December 1918), the unification of laws became one of the supreme political values and a priority task of the government. Until the adoption of the Constitution of 1921, the unification of laws took place by way of enactment of decrees of ‘legal importance’ (‘government of decrees’). According to the Constitution of 1921, there were two ways in which the unification of laws could be carried out: by legalizing former decrees and by passing laws by the legislative committee (“little parliament”) in a summary procedure. But the goal was not achieved that way. The principal laws (the criminal code and the codes of criminal and civil procedure, respectively) were passed under the regime of the dictatorship (1929). The Civil Code was not passed until the fall of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, so the citizens ‘did not feel as the members of the same community’ in that regard. The same was true in the field of executive law until 1938, and later concerning the homestead (farmer’s minimum). The unification of laws took place in the shadow of the conflict between Serbian lawyers and lawyers from the former Austria-Hungary. Unified laws were passed mainly regardless of the disagreement of Serbian lawyers. Many of institutes of law of former Kingdom of Serbia (limitation in the use of witnesses, limitation of the peasant's benchmark ability, execution of the death penalty by a firing squad) were repealed by new Yugoslav laws. The Kingdom of SCS turned from being a country that consisted of six legal systems to a country in which a part of her citizens (citizens of the former Kingdom of Serbia) were forced to suffer the “violence” of the imposed laws. Serbians had sacrificed parliamentarism for the purpose of unifying laws, which eventually came at a great cost. The unification of laws indicated that Croats and Slovenes leaned towards a real union or that they did not want any kind of community with Serbians