Dr Nenad Đurđević

THE BILL ON RESTORING SECULARIZED REAL ESTATE TO THE CHURCHES AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES - A RESTITUTION OR A FULL DEPRIVATION OF THE CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES PROPERTY IN MONTENEGRO

All the states founded on the territory of former Yugoslavia,  except Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, have passed their laws on denationalisation. Thereto only Serbia has passed special Law on restoring (restitution) property to the churches and religiuos communities. Since Montenegro is one of the last countries that left open the issue of restitution of secularized property, the author in this paper analyses if the propositions from the prepared Bill on restoring secularized real estate to the churches and religiuos communities from March 2010 follows "the trail" of positive expiriences of other countries or follows the bad examples in comparative legislation practice and particularly, if the prepared Bill is fully in accordance with the law system of Montenegro or general rules on protection and restitution of property. From the fact that Montenegro legislator  has prescribed in the Law on restoring of deprived property rights and compensations  that terms, forms and procedure of restitution of secularized property will be regulated by special law, one could justifiably conclude that the mentioned law did not solve the issue of confessional property restitution and that the special law will percieve and solve in a proper way all problems on restoring the property rights that were taken from churches and religious communities after the Second World War. One could also expected that those solutions would not be more unfavorable than the general denationalisation regime, especially because we cannot find such examples in comparative law (on the contrary is quite the opposite case). The author comes to a conclusion in this paper that churches and religious communities will have more losses than benefits because the denationalisation is not regulated by the same law, if the proposed bill becomes final law text. According to the author, that would mean the final deprivation of churches and religious commnuities property rights and not path toward restitution and elimination of injustice.

Key words: restitution, property, churches and religious communities, denationalisation, Montenegro, the Bill.