Parliamentary parties on Friday commended the institution of free legal aid and some of them said that the four million kuna set aside for that purpose annually was not enough and the amount should be increased.

The purpose of free legal aid is to help ensure the equality of all before the law, access to courts and other legal bodies, as well as efficient legal protection for the socially and financially most vulnerable groups of citizens.

Pensioners are the group who use free legal aid most frequently, followed by people receiving the minimum wage, the unemployed and persons with disabilities, Dragan Jeckov of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) said in a discussion on a report on the exercise of the right to free legal aid in 2019.

She said that providers of free legal aid complained that the funding available to them was not sufficient because they spend HRK 92 per user of primary free legal aid and HRK 324 per user of secondary free legal aid. It is commendable that in the last two years aid has been paid on time, she said.

Roma minority MP Veljko Kajtazi warned that the list of users of free legal aid did not contain people without citizenship.

He noted that there was a large number of Russian women married in Croatia who have problem obaining citizenship, and called for defining a model of legal aid for Roma as existed in the decade starting in 2005 and securing more funding for free legal aid than has been the case so far.