Constitutional Court readies for vote, Petrov case stalls
Vladan Petrov says the court is preparing seriously for the next elections. Hours earlier the opposition SSP said prosecutors had said nothing for four months about a complaint against him.
The president of Serbia’s Constitutional Court, Vladan Petrov, said on Friday, July 31, that the court is preparing seriously for the next elections. He spoke on the K1 television programme “Uranak”, and the Tanjug agency carried the statement at 12.54. A few hours earlier, at 09.56, the opposition Freedom and Justice Party (SSP) announced that four months had passed since it filed a criminal complaint against Petrov, without a single word from prosecutors on whether anything had been done about it.
The statement came from Ana Godjevac, deputy head of the party’s Belgrade board, and was carried by the Beta and Fonet agencies. The complaint rests on Petrov’s own public remarks that certain cases at the Constitutional Court get put in a drawer, among them cases arising from the December 2023 parliamentary elections.
“Instead of an answer, we got four months of silence, which shows that someone decided to protect Petrov too, by putting our complaint in a drawer.”
That is how Godjevac described the prosecution’s handling of the filing. In the same statement she added that “judge Vladan Petrov spoke publicly about postponing decisions in cases concerning the 2023 elections”.
The party is asking prosecutors for three things:
- to say whether any action at all has been taken on the complaint
- to tell the public what stage the procedure has reached
- to act without delay, in line with the law
The reasoning offered is short and general: equality before the law is the foundation of any rule-of-law state, and it does not bend for high office.
What Petrov said about the elections
Speaking the same day, Petrov addressed the court’s readiness for the electoral cycle and made no mention of the complaint against him.
“It is important that all the institutions of our state meet the next elections prepared. As president of the Constitutional Court I can tell the public that we are preparing seriously for the next elections, in the sense that we will be ready to come out perhaps even in advance with clear positions on when it is possible, and why it is possible, to turn to the Constitutional Court as a final instance.”
The idea of publishing guidance in advance is not a formality. The Constitutional Court is the last address in an electoral dispute, after the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) and the Administrative Court, and the deadlines along that chain are counted in days. Petrov also said that systemic irregularities reported after the previous elections should be corrected before an electoral process is closed.
A case from January 2024 still without a ruling
The opposition asked the Constitutional Court in January 2024 to annul the parliamentary elections held in December 2023. As of July 31, 2026, two and a half years later, the court has not ruled. The only reply that arrived was a rejection covering the Belgrade elections, on the grounds that the city assembly had not been constituted when the appeal was lodged.
Biljana Djordjevic, an MP for the Green-Left Front (ZLF), summed up that record for the daily Nova on July 29.
“We filed three requests at the time, for the annulment of the provincial, the national and the Belgrade elections. An answer came only for the Belgrade ones.”
Petrov himself, in an April 2026 interview with Nova television, described the mechanism the opposition now cites as the basis for its complaint: “At the Constitutional Court you can… put a case in a drawer and not resolve it for several convocations. I have put away the ones that were hard for me too.” That sentence is what prompted the SSP filing.
Why prosecutorial silence is not a technicality here
A criminal complaint means nothing until prosecutors decide whether there are grounds for suspicion. The law does, though, require that the person who filed it be informed, so four months without a word is a verifiable fact regardless of who is right on the merits. Prosecutors had made no public statement on the case as this article was published, and the Constitutional Court has not commented on the party’s claims either.
Set alongside a case that has sat undecided since January 2024, the picture is one that the two sides describe in entirely different language. The governing side sees a court working at its own pace and preparing for elections. The opposition sees a court president who described the practice of shelving cases himself, then announced that his institution would meet the elections ready.
The episode fits a pattern we have covered in recent weeks. The REM regulatory council failed for a second time to elect a chair, prosecutors publicly criticised judge Ksenija Maric over rejected search warrants, and the OSCE’s ODIHR asked for a full observation mission for the coming vote. The bodies that rule on electoral disputes are entering the cycle with open questions about their own work, and that is the thread running through all three stories.
No election date has been called yet. Until it is, two numbers stay on the record: the case on the December 2023 elections is in its third year without a ruling, and the complaint against the court’s president is in its fifth month without a reply.
