President More Important than Law

VREME is publishing the results of research carried out on 100 graduate students and students of the fourth year (those who passed the Constitutional Law exam) at the Belgrade and Novi Sad Law Faculties. The research referred to the knowledge of the F.R.Y. Constitution and certain constitutional and law solutions.

The research was in the category of examining law awareness. Research, which includes the knowledge of law and attitudes about certain law solutions, are common in the world but this is the first research of this kind in our country. Democratic countries care a great deal about the public opinion of the constitutional and law solutions, because there it is believed that unless legal regulations are generally accepted, there can be no legal state.

The research was at first imagined as a pilot-study of larger research in which law students were to be the "control" group. However, the results which we got from the future lawyers were so shocking that other groups became uninteresting!

Why did we choose the latest F.R.Y. Constitution? The 1992 Constitution was particularly interesting because it introduced many democratic solutions (quite common in constitutions throughout the world), but the solutions remained unknown in public. For example, Article 23 says the police, when arresting, are to inform the suspect that he may remain silent because what he says may be used against him. We know this procedure from American films, but who has heard of our police doing such a thing? And how many people know that the police are supposed to do it?

Article 42, for example, says that it is forbidden to form para-military groups in our country. How was this article implemented in this war? And how many people in F.R.Y. know that this is illegal? Our research showed that as many as 73 percent of the students of the Faculty of Philosophy and 45 percent of Law students do not know this!

The alarming fact is that the least known articles are those which pertain to the protection of human rights. For example, only one-third of future lawyers know that the State Security has no right to search homes and open letters unless they have specific warrants to do so. This is a frightening fact from the aspect of democratization and human rights in F.R.Y.

Used to the age-old practice in which the law said one thing and something else was applied, our lawyers think that what the law says is less important than what is applied. Why should they then remember what the Constitution says?

As for the human rights, they are jeopardized by the general atmosphere which the war and nationalism imposed on us. This is a good illustration of the research. When we asked whether our Constitution forbade the spreading of inter-ethnic hatred, an enormous percentage of answers was "YES." But when we asked whether the press which instigates extermination and displacement of Kosovo Albanians should be banned, as many as 29 percent of future lawyers said "NO." Are the results of the research a reflection of the law students' knowledge of the Constitution or of their way of thinking and system of values? The best answer to this question can be found in the second part of the research where we asked the law students to comment on certain constitutional solutions. This was a special surprise. Law students, even graduate students - i.e. the future elite - proved to be extremely authoritarian. One third of them - future lawyers - said: "For us, the leader whom the people can trust is more important than various laws." If it can be a comfort, most students opted for some democratic solutions such as constitutional assembly (82 percent) and the necessity to increase the jurisdiction of the Federal Parliament (62 percent). At the same time, eleven percent agreed with the statement: "The Constitution does not matter, what matters is the president of the republic." Statistically speaking, this is not a large percentage, but considering the fact that it came from law students, it is terrifying. What should be expected from ordinary people?

A number of claims point to authoritarianism and totalitarianism: from the one according to which State Security should be allowed to search homes without a warrant (69 percent), to the one that sexual criminals should be whipped in public (41 percent) and to the fact that less than half the future lawyers (45 percent) think judges should be chosen in democratic elections.

We had some difficulty in carrying out the research at the Novi Sad Law Faculty, perhaps because of the general atmosphere there. However, there are no significant differences in their knowledge of the Constitution as compared to the knowledge of the Belgrade Law Faculty students. Only the Novi Sad students are much more authoritarian. Whether this is a consequence of a specific selection - it is hard to tell.

The overall impression is that their answers were not based on what they were taught but on the general atmosphere in the society. The erosion of legal norms and a decreased certainty of sanctions for criminal acts - especially when the criminal acts are on the state level - diminished the interest for the legal norm. And the diminished interest for the legal norm, even among lawyers, clearly shows that we are getting farther away from the legal state each day.