28th "Petar Simonetti" Symposium of Legal Professionals

7 April 2022 - After two years of videoconferencing, the 28th International Symposium "Petar Simonetti", organised by the Rijeka Faculty of Law, High Administrative Court of Croatia and Croatian Notaries Chamber, was held in Poreč on 6 and 7 April 2022. In his introductory speech given at the opening session, Dr Miroslav Šeparović, President of the Croatian Constitutional Court, emphasized a prominent role of the Symposium for the Croatian academic, scientific and legal professionals and the high value of corresponding collection of papers, as a source of high quality scientific and expert literature.

For the first time this year, the program also embraced a separate part related to the Constitutional Court practice. Within this frame, Dr Snježana Bagić, Deputy President, and Sanja Trgovac, Head of the Legal Advisers' Service of the Constitutional Court, spoke about protection of the right to life, i.e. on application of Article 21 of the Croatian Constitution and Article 2 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Among other aspects, they pointed out that in 2015 the Constitutional Court revised its Rules of Procedure and enabled the lodging of constitutional complaints before exhaustion of available legal remedies, for ineffective investigation of criminal offences related to Article 2 (right to life) and Article 3 (prohibition of torture) of the cited Convention. European Court of Human Rights finds this "type" of constitutional complaint an effective legal remedy as of 2019 (Kušić and others vs. Croatia (dec. 2019).