A lot of attention has been paid to the environment and its protection in Serbian legislation. The right to healthy environment is guaranteed by the Constitution, and in the last two decades numerous laws have been passed regulating various aspects of the environment in order to ensure its protection. The subject of the paper is the claim to eliminate the danger of damage, stipulated by the Law on Obligations from 1978. From the enactment of the law, this legal institution has been considered as a means suitable for providing preventive environmental protection, which is why it is often called an “environmental lawsuit” in Serbian legal theory.

The rules on the succession and transfer of agricultural land in Serbia may be characterised as liberalistic. There are no special inheritance regimes applicable specifically to the succession of agricultural land. There is only the possibility of an heir, engaged in agricultural production, to request that the court name him the sole heir of the agricultural land, with the obligation to compensate others. Similarly, the transfer of agricultural land by inter vivos transaction is also essentially devoid of any serious legal restrictions, either for natural persons or for legal entities. There is no cap on the acquisition of ownership, nor must the buyer prove that he or she is, in fact, engaged in agricultural production. Serbian law excludes the possibility of foreign persons or legal entities acquiring ownership of agricultural land. According to the Stabilisation and Association Agreement concluded with the European Union, it was expected that Serbia would gradually enable natural persons and legal entities from the member states of the EU to acquire ownership of agricultural land by no later than 1 September 2017 when the four-year period for the implementation of this obligation expired. Seemingly, in order to fulfil the obligation, the Serbian National Assembly amended the Law on Agricultural Land in August 2017. The amendments explicitly regulate under which conditions natural persons and legal entities from the EU may acquire ownership of agricultural land. However, even a superficial reading of the new regulation reveals that the opposite effect has been achieved. Instead of enabling natural persons and legal entities from the EU to obtain ownership of agricultural land on equal footing with domestic natural persons and legal entities, the legislature created a set of special conditions applicable only to the former but not to the latter. Moreover, the conditions are so strict that no legal entity could meet them, while natural persons only hypothetically could, if at all. Therefore, it seems that the 2017 amendments to the Law on Agricultural Land hardly aimed to implement the Stabilisation and Association Agreement.

The paper gives an overview of the rules on the acquisition of ownership of agricultural land by foreigners in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Slovenia and Croatia initiated their accession to the European Union at different times and under different conditions, while Serbia is not yet a member state of the Union, but has been a candidate country for several years, and the harmonization of its national law with the acquis communautaire has been under way for some time. These circumstances determine the right of foreigners, in particular natural persons and legal entities from the European Union, to acquire ownership of agricultural land in these countries. In Slovenia non-EU natural persons and legal entities cannot acquire ownership of agricultural land. In contrast, Slovenia opened its real estate market rather early to EU citizens and legal entities. Only the Association Agreement provided for a transitional period of four years during which they could not acquire ownership of agricultural land. From 2003 onwards, citizens and legal entities from the EU are entitled to acquire land ownership without restriction. The Accession Treaty prescribed no moratorium. Similarly to Slovenia, non-EU natural persons and legal entities may not acquire ownership of agricultural land in Croatia either. The Accession Treaty provided for a seven-year moratorium on the acquisition of ownership of agricultural land by EU citizens and legal entities. The primary moratorium expired on 30 June 2020. However, the EU Commission approved an extension of the moratorium for another three years. Thus, EU citizens and legal entities are still unable to acquire ownership of agricultural land until 30 June 2023. Foreigners’ right to acquire ownership of agricultural land is in general excluded in Serbian law as well. The Stabilization and Association Agreement from 2008 provided for the liberalization of the real estate and land markets for EU citizens and legal entities. However, in 2017 the Serbian legislature amended the Act on Agricultural Land only few days before the expiry of the moratorium on ownership included in the Stabilization and Association Agreement. Nominally, the amendments were intended to introduce explicit regulation on the right of EU citizens and legal entities to acquire ownership of agricultural land, as required by the Stabilization and Association Agreement. However, instead of extending the same conditions applicable to the domestic natural persons and legal entities to those from the EU, the legislator specified additional set of conditions applicable only to the latter. It, in fact, excludes legal entities from the right to acquire property, as they cannot be registered family farmers, and makes the right of natural persons subject to conditions that effectively exclude their acquisition of ownership by 1 September 2027 due to the calculation of deadlines.

In Serbia, the legal status of limited liability companies (LLCs; društvo sa ograničenom odgovornošću, d.o.o.) is for the most part regulated by the Companies Act (Zakon o privrednim društvima). All four basic legal forms of company are regulated by this Act. Unlike in Austria and Germany, there are no special laws on LLCs and joint stock companies (JSCs). Regulating all legal forms of a company with the same act, including procedures for their liquidation, status changes (acquisition, merger, division, and spin-off), and changes of legal form, may be considered a conceptual shortcoming of the regulation relating to LLCs and of company law in Serbia in general. A specific law would enable legislators to tailor detailed rules pertaining only to LLCs, in which all peculiarities of this legal form of companies might be better addressed. Furthermore, there are relatively numerous legal norms applicable to JSCs, the appropriate application of which is can be legally extended to LLCs. However, most of them are not conceptually applicable due to the different nature of JSCs and LLCs. In addition, company law will have to undergo significant changes in upcoming years due to the process of accession of Serbia to the European Union and the fulfilment of the conditions contained in chapter 6 of the accession negotiations pertaining to company law.

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