North Macedonia: Supporting enhanced access to higher quality Free Legal Aid Services

Project Duration

36 months, 24 May 2019 – 23 May 2022

Budget

Euro 800 000

Key issues to be addressed

There is a need to support, through targeted capacity building, the main stakeholders to readily and efficiently implement the new law, while also enabling them to prevent and address future shortcomings through improved coordination and cooperation.
Regional Offices of the Ministry of Justice appear to be understaffed and existing staff suffers from limited resources and low levels of performance and motivation.
FLA literacy of both legal professionals and potential beneficiaries needs to be enhanced to support broader accessibility, with a special focus on women, children, and vulnerable groups

project components

The Action "Supporting enhanced access to higher quality Free Legal Aid services in North Macedonia" aims at enhancing the efficiency, quality, accessibility, and awareness of free legal aid in North Macedonia. More concretely the Action will focus on the:

harmonization of provisions, policies and practices related to free legal aid in North Macedonia;
capacity building for the main actors in the field (Ministry of Justice, Bar Association and CSOs) including more structured and continuous coordination between the main stakeholders;
awareness raising for the public and related institutional actors in the country to support increased access to free legal aid.

This Action is part of the Council of Europe/European Union "Horizontal Facility for Western Balkans and Turkey II"

Overall Objective

The Action aims at supporting the main actors in enhancing the efficiency, quality, scope, accessibility, and awareness of free legal aid provision in the country and addressing identified shortcomings. It builds upon the results achieved in the implementation of the previous Action on this issue (HF-35“Supporting Free Legal Aid Reforms in ‘the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”) and supports effective implementation of the new Law on free legal aid, adopted in 2019.

Expected Results

The legal and policy framework related to the provision of Free Legal Aid will be harmonised in line with Council of Europe standards.

Capacities of Free Legal Aid providers to deliver quality legal aid are strengthened.
Access to Free Legal Aid by the population will be enhanced and the efficiency of the Free Legal Aid in North Macedonia will be strengthened.

The project continues the work initiated under the phase one of the Project.

target groups

Ministry of Justice, Bar Association, CSOs and Legal Clinics authorized to provide FLA

Judiciary, Centres for Social Welfare

End Beneficiaries

Free Legal Aid applicants, potential applicants and general population.

Project team

Rita Marascalchi, Project Co-ordinator (Strasbourg)

Irena Cuculovska Jakimovska, Project Manager (Skopje)

Anamarija Mitrovska, Project Assistant (Skopje)

North Macedonian website

Access to North Macedonian website.

Useful links

Project News

Back Third Steering Committee Meeting of the action “Supporting enhanced access to higher quality Free Legal Aid services in North Macedonia”

In order to take stock of the current achievements and agree on the future interventions, the Third Steering Committee meeting of the EU and Council of Europe joint action “Supporting enhanced access to higher quality Free Legal Aid services in North Macedonia” took place on 28 January 2021 in a form of an online meeting.

The meeting brought together representatives of the Ministry of Justice, Bar Association, Macedonian Young Lawyers Association, Secretariat for European Affairs, Foundation Open Society Macedonia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Delegation of the European Union to North Macedonia and the action team to discuss the key results in the last period and exchanging views on the planned interventions for the future.

During the presentation of the results, a special focus was brought on the activities related to the awareness raising campaign for Free Legal Aid (FLA) that kicked off on 26 October 2020 where the action team had the opportunity to present the main results.

During the meeting was highlighted that the action achieved significant progress in strengthening the co-ordination and communication among the key stakeholders at national level by supporting the facilitation of the meetings of the National Co-ordination Body for implementation of the Law on Free Legal Aid (NCB) and by the successful work of the Working Group for drafting the Referral Protocol and the Directory of organizations. These achievements will increase the quality and the efficiency of FLA provision to the citizens in North Macedonia.

The Steering Committee members agreed on the proposed activities for the upcoming six months confirming that the action will continue to focus on enhancing the capacities and the quality of services of the regional offices of the Ministry of Justice, the Bar Association and the civil society organisations and Legal Clinics authorised for FLA. It will also focus on providing expert support to the Ministry of Justice and its FLA unit in harmonisation of provisions, policies and practices related to free legal aid, data collection and restructuring of this Unit. Further support will be provided in the area of legal aid in criminal proceedings.

The action on “Supporting enhanced access to higher quality Free Legal Aid services in North Macedonia” is part of the “Horizontal Facility for the Western Balkans and Turkey II”, a joint European Union/Council of Europe programme implemented by the Council of Europe that enables the Beneficiaries to meet their reform agendas in the fields of human rights, rule of law and democracy and to comply with the European standards, including where relevant within the framework of the EU enlargement process.

Skopje 28 January 2021