Judicial Information System Down for Two Months in Serbia
Serbia's Judicial Information System has been down since late May, and as of August 11 notaries still cannot obtain civil registry documents. Citizens abroad are hit hardest.
The Judicial Information System, the electronic backbone through which courts and public notaries exchange data with state registries, crashed in late May this year and had not been fully restored as of August 11. The system falls under the Ministry of Justice. The outage has now lasted two and a half months, and the cost is being paid by citizens who need to notarize real estate contracts, as well as by those who need civil registry documents for probate and property proceedings.
Without access to the registries, public notaries could not certify sale contracts, gift agreements or inheritance statements. In the first weeks of the outage, real estate transactions essentially stopped. From early June onward, citizens visiting notaries kept hearing the same explanation: the system used for certifications was down.
Property Deeds Work Again, Birth Certificates Still Do Not
The situation has since improved, but only for part of the workload. Real estate agent Kaca Lazarevic says the property side of the problem has been resolved, while the part involving personal documents has not changed at all.
“You no longer need to bring a property deed from the companies that issue them. Nothing has improved when it comes to birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates. Those are the documents you need for inheritance cases, for property sales, for other things you need in life,” Lazarevic explained.
These are documents without which no probate case can even start. A citizen who lacks a death certificate has no way to prove the legal basis for inheritance, so the entire case stalls before it is opened.
What Can Notaries Do Without the System?
Practice has found its own workaround, on the real estate side. Attorney Aleksandra Lukic explained that lawyers who have professional access to the land registry can pull a property title extract for their client themselves, and notaries accept such an extract with a note that they could not access the system directly. Milica Petrovic and Bosiljka Labovic confirmed that land surveying agencies can also issue property title extracts, which keeps contract certification and land registry entry moving without delay.
The workaround functions, but the client pays for it. What used to be a single electronic check inside a notary’s office is now a separate job for a lawyer or an agency, with its own price and its own timeline. Lazarevic notes that citizens also pay for the delay through the fees they owe notaries.
One public notary, who spoke on condition of anonymity because none of them may speak publicly without approval from the Serbian Chamber of Public Notaries, described the position of clients caught between a down payment and a deadline.
“Imagine people who put down a deposit on an apartment, say 30,000 euros, and that deposit has a deadline for signing the contract. It is similar with loans,” the notary said. “The question now is whether the state will take steps to protect these clients, because these are circumstances they had no way to influence.”
The Serbian Chamber of Public Notaries said it had no comment on the issue.
Diaspora Serbians Wait the Longest
The hardest hit are citizens who handle their affairs in Serbia from abroad, through a power of attorney. They can neither certify a contract nor obtain a document requested by a foreign authority, and the distance does not allow them to come back a second time.
“I have a case of a family that requested a death certificate, I don’t know why a fresh one when nothing changes there, so they could send it to a lawyer in Montenegro where the probate hearing is taking place,” Lazarevic said.
Such a case is not delayed by a week. When a document bound for another country stalls, the hearing before the foreign court is delayed too, and the family waits for a new date.
The Ministry Stays Silent
There is still no official explanation for what caused the outage. The Ministry of Justice did not respond to questions submitted by N1, while in a statement to RTS the ministry said that some services have limited functionality and that it is working with the eGovernment Office to improve the system’s security and stability. It also said the system would be restored during the week.
That announcement is now the only date citizens have. If the civil registry services are still not working by the end of this week, the outage in Serbia’s judicial IT infrastructure will enter its third month without a single official explanation for its cause.
