The two countries’ failure to maintain liaisons to the EU’s criminal justice agency – partly for political reasons – is a setback to vital cooperation against cross-border organised crime groups.
Sasa Djordjevic
This is not merely an administrative lapse but an institutional setback in the fight against organised crime. The damage is not abstract.
Eurojust is a central hub for judicial cooperation in the EU, linking prosecutors to secure channels, coordination meetings and a network covering more than 70 countries worldwide. That matters, especially where bilateral cooperation is slower or weaker, including in drug-trafficking cases reaching into Latin America. It also matters because Eurojust helps to turn cross-border information into evidence that can be used promptly in domestic courts, rather than allowing cases to stall in slower mutual legal assistance procedures.
The practical loss is even greater in joint investigations. Eurojust supports and funds joint investigation teams, covering key cross-border costs, such as travel and accommodation, interpretation and translation, transport of seized items, forensic examinations and specialist expertise, reducing pressure on national budgets. When there is no liaison prosecutor, countries lose not only speed and trusted access but also part of the practical capacity needed to use these tools effectively.
Rebuilding liaison prosecutor capacity at Eurojust will not be immediate.
In Serbia, the process is especially vulnerable to deadlock. Under the 2019 agreement with Eurojust, the post must be held by a prosecutor, and the appointment falls within the competence of the High Prosecutorial Council, which assumed a central role in prosecutorial appointments after the 2023 judicial reforms.
In practice, this means that a two-thirds majority must be secured across a divided body: on one side are the members elected from among prosecutors, together with the Supreme Public Prosecutor; on the other are the members chosen by parliament, along with the Justice Minister. The Council has already shown how easily this can stall, having failed even to place the issue on its agenda. Restoring continuity will, therefore, depend not only on finding a candidate but on securing agreement across both the prosecutorial and political sides of the Council.
In North Macedonia, the formal procedure is simpler, as the Justice Minister appoints the liaison prosecutor on a proposal from the Public Prosecutor’s Office. In principle, that should be routine. In practice, it still leaves room for delay if there is no agreement between the prosecution and the political executive.
Even once a new appointment is made, continuity cannot be restored overnight. A new liaison prosecutor must obtain security access, learn Eurojust’s working methods and rebuild operational contacts and trust. That can take many months. The disruption is greater because in both Serbia and North Macedonia, there is no assistant at the desk to maintain day-to-day continuity and reduce the gap while a successor is being appointed and brought up to speed.
As an interim step, both countries could rely more on contact points, which are designed to maintain rapid links with Eurojust – and the contact point should be the prosecution, not the government.
But that would be only a partial fix. The damage has already been done. Eurojust’s own experience in the Western Balkans suggests that cooperation becomes markedly more active and effective once a country has a liaison prosecutor. A contact point may help avoid a complete vacuum, but it cannot replace the speed, continuity and operational access that only a liaison prosecutor can provide.
Sasa Djordjevic is a senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.
