Belgrade prosecutors challenge judge over search warrants
The Belgrade Higher Public Prosecutor's Office says Judge Ksenija Maric is breaking the Criminal Procedure Code by refusing search warrants, and wants the daily Danas to print its reply.
Belgrade’s senior prosecutors have done something they normally avoid: they named a sitting judge in public. The Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade says that Ksenija Maric, a pre-trial judge at the Higher Court in Belgrade, acts against the Criminal Procedure Code every time she turns down a request for a search warrant.
The statement landed on July 30, 2026, the same day the daily Danas ran an interview with Maric under the headline “I rule by law, not by political wishes”. Prosecutors invoked Article 94 of the Law on Public Information and Media, which puts the paper in the position of having to decide on publishing their reply.
The dispute has a concrete trigger. Maric refused to sign a warrant to search the flat of a man arrested over death threats against the president of Serbia.
The case prosecutors make against the judge
Their central sentence reads:
Namely, Judge Ksenija Maric, as the pre-trial judge, by refusing to issue the requested warrant, is acting in direct contravention of Articles 152 to 157 of the Criminal Procedure Code
Everything else in the statement expands that one claim. The office leans on the wording of Article 152, which allows a home search where it is probable that the suspect, traces of a crime or items relevant to the proceedings will be found. On that reading, the law asks for no degree of suspicion at all, not even the lowest one, only for the probability of a result.
The second complaint follows from the first. At the evidence-gathering stage, prosecutors argue, a judge has no authority to test whether or how far suspicion exists, so demanding it adds a condition the statute never set. The statement also cites Articles 82 to 84 on evidence, and Articles 21 and 22.
One passage comes down to a single word. The code says a pre-trial judge decides, the office notes, and never says she tries a case.
Prosecutors add that they were forced to respond because the judge had gone public with unfounded and unargued criticism of their work, and they describe her conduct as an arbitrary refusal to issue warrants.
Why can’t prosecutors simply appeal?
Because the law leaves them nowhere to go. The office points out that a refusal to issue a search warrant cannot be appealed to a higher court, which makes the pre-trial judge’s decision final on that point. There is no instance to turn to inside the case itself.
That explains the form the reaction took. A dispute that would otherwise travel up through the courts ended up in a press release and in a demand that a newspaper carry the prosecution’s answer. A prosecution service naming the judge who rules on its own requests is not a familiar sight in Serbian courtrooms.
The same judge, the opposite story days earlier
Maric was in the news shortly before this, as the target of threats, and prosecutors reacted on her behalf at the time. The same institution is now publicly disputing how she handles a case that also turns on threats, in this instance against the president of Serbia.
The next move belongs to Danas. Under Article 94 the paper has to decide whether to print the prosecution’s reply. The case that set off the whole argument stays exactly where it was, in front of the same pre-trial judge.
