{"id":4201,"date":"2025-01-15T09:52:42","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T07:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/2025\/01\/case-of-petrovic-and-others-v-croatia\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T09:52:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T07:52:42","slug":"case-of-petrovic-and-others-v-croatia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/2025\/01\/case-of-petrovic-and-others-v-croatia\/","title":{"rendered":"CASE OF PETROVI\u0106 AND OTHERS v. CROATIA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This judgment concerns three cases of women who suspect their newborn babies were abducted from Croatian state hospitals between 1986-1994 and given up for unlawful adoption. The Court found Croatia violated Article 8 of the Convention (right to respect for private and family life) by failing to provide the mothers with credible information about their children&#8217;s fate.The key aspects of the decision are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Court established that cases of allegedly abducted newborns constitute a continuing violation that persists as long as authorities fail to account for the children&#8217;s fate<\/li>\n<li>Croatia had positive obligations to investigate what happened to the babies while they were still in Croatian hospitals, even for cases where children were transferred to Serbia<\/li>\n<li>The Croatian authorities&#8217; response was inadequate as they mainly cited statute of limitations and failed to properly investigate inconsistencies in medical records or conduct DNA tests<\/li>\n<li>The Court ordered Croatia to establish within one year a special mechanism supervised by an independent body to investigate all similar cases and provide redress to affected parents<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Court&#8217;s main findings were that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Croatia failed its continuing positive obligation to provide credible information about the fate of allegedly abducted babies<\/li>\n<li>The State&#8217;s response of only providing available documentation was insufficient given the inconsistencies in records<\/li>\n<li>Authorities improperly dismissed complaints based on statute of limitations without considering the continuing nature of the violations<\/li>\n<li>A systemic solution is needed given evidence of other similar cases in Croatia from the 1980s-90s<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Court ordered Croatia to establish within one year a mechanism to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Provide individual redress to all parents in similar situations<\/li>\n<li>Be supervised by an independent body with adequate investigative powers<\/li>\n<li>Be capable of providing credible answers about each child&#8217;s fate<\/li>\n<li>Award compensation as appropriate<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/?i=001-238792\"><strong>Full text by link<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This judgment concerns three cases of women who suspect their newborn babies were abducted from Croatian state hospitals between 1986-1994 and given up for unlawful adoption. The Court found Croatia violated Article 8 of the Convention (right to respect for private and family life) by failing to provide the mothers with credible information about their&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[129,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-echr-decisions","category-eu-legislation-important","pmpro-has-access"],"acf":{"patreon-level":0},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lexcovery.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}