"The state has to withdraw 20 percent of its lawsuits because courts are overloaded with unnecessary litigation, Supreme Court Chief Justice, Radovan Dobronic, said in his first report to the Parliament," state agency Hina said on Wednesday, citing Wednesday's edition of the Jutarnji List daily.

“If courts are to increase their timeliness, it is essential that there are not approximately one million new cases each year. The annual input of about one million cases in a country of barely four million is unnatural and reflects many and varied reasons of a systemic nature,” Hina said, probably citing Jutarnji.

That is one of the key highlights of the annual report on the situation in the judiciary for 2021, which is Judge Dobronić’s first report to the Sabor, made six months after he stepped into office.

In the report, unlike his predecessors, Dobronic more openly discusses concrete problems in various areas of the judiciary and recommends concrete solutions.

The timeliness and quality of work of the courts will not be achieved with amendments to the Civil Procedure Act or claims that judges aren’t working hard enough, said Dobronic.

He recommends adopting a package of measures to improve working conditions for first instance judges who, according to him, are the leading element of the judiciary. He calls for changing what he describes as settled yet incorrect forms of judicial practice as well as for changing the conduct of stakeholders other than courts that generate thousands of unnecessary court cases every year.

New cases can be prevented in different ways and one is for the state to restrict litigation between state-owned institutions and companies, he says.

Dobronic blamed that situation on “incompetent and irresponsible management boards of state-owned companies and institutions.” The large number of litigations between individual companies, institutions, agencies and institutes owned by the state “simply cannot be justified,” he says in the report.