INSTITUTE OF REHABILITATION IN THE NATIONAL LEGISLATION (1929-2011)

Abstract

This year, it has been nine decades since the Criminal Code of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was put into effect on 29 January 1929. Apart from the unification of criminal laws on the entire territory of the Kingdom of SCS, where several different criminal laws had been in operation earlier, the new Code provided for the institute of rehabilitation unknown to the old criminal laws. In the aftermath of World War II, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY) was based on the tenets of the republican legal system. The new legal order introduced new criminal codes which were consistent with the times and the values that the new state was protecting: the 1947 Criminal Code of the FPRY, the 1951 Criminal Code of the FPRY, and the 1976 Criminal Code of the SFRY. All these Codes included provisions on rehabilitation. Nowadays, this institute is contained in the current Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia and in special legislative acts on rehabilitation of political convicts of 2006 and 2011. This paper aims to examine the normative framework of rehabilitation in our legal system from the historical perspective.