The bill on minor offences is one in a series of laws aimed at reducing the backlog of court cases and increasing court efficiency, notably by introducing stricter penalties, Justice Minister Ana Lovrin said.
As much as 30-35% of unresolved court cases refer to minor offences, with many of them entailing minimum penalties, the minister said.
The last amendments to the law in 2002 made minor offence proceedings long, introducing the possibility of appeal to all judgements.
This resulted in the High Police Court passing verdicts in only 50% of the cases, with statute of limitations expiring for the other half of the cases.
The bill on minor offences proposes that statute of limitations be prolonged twofold.
The bill introduces the collection of fines for minor offences without going to court for all offences envisaging fines of up to 1,000 kuna for citizens and 10,000 kuna for companies.
Appeals to the collection of fines will be dealt with by courts of the first instance and their rulings will be final, which will relieve the High Police Court of 50% of the cases, Lovrin said.
The process of judicial rationalisation will start with the merger of ten municipal and ten police courts. In deciding which courts will be joined, the government decided that those would be courts that employ fewer than five judges and are less than 50 kilometres apart.
The results of this project will be followed until the end of the year, when a final decision on court rationalisation will be proposed, Lovrin said.
The government session, which was also attended by the EU Commissioner on justice, freedom and security, Franco Frattini, was also informed about the course of reform of the judiciary and anti-corruption programs.
Lovrin said that the year 2006 saw a 120% increase in corruption-related crimes compared to 2005, while the backlog of court cases was reduced by 30%.
PM Ivo Sanader said that by the end of the year Croatia would try to open negotiations with the EU on as many policy chapters as possible, and that it expected talks on all chapters to be closed and negotiations completed by the end of 2008.
We can count on good and fast negotiations, and if everything goes well, I am confident Croatia will soon become the 28th EU member, Sanader said.