In its issue of January 19, 1998, Split weekly Feral Tribune brought an article by Zoran Daskalovic, dealing with the controversial new Croatian law on associations.
Last June, the parliamentarian majority accepted governments proposal of the Law dealing with associations. With this law, the state is authorized to do with civil associations whatever it pleases. If the citizens intent on forming an association muddle through the first half of the Law and fulfill minutely prescribed conditions for the formation and registration of associations, the state is authorized to control their operation and to penalize them, and in the end, to forbid their activities, whenever they breach any of numerous provisions on what they can, and what they cant do.
The state is authorized to temporarily forbid the activities of any association already in a situation where there is a founded suspicion that the association is acting contrary to the Constitutiona and the law. So, if any authorized state bureaucrat, or somebody above him, only has a founded suspicion that some association is breaching the law, he can temporarily close it down. At the same time the penalties for the associations and its members are much more drastic then those prescribed for those breaking the law on trade companies, also even when they threaten the health and lives of people. True, some of the authors of the Law on associations, responded to the objections that it is rigorous by saying that utmost penalties will not be utilized; this could mean that the prescribed penalties are there so that the state could have a stick with which it can beat an association that steps on its toes, that is, the one which uncovers its black spots .
The parliament representatives have practically empowered the state institutions to separate civil associations into suitable and unsuitable, and then to suffocate the latter with all means of state repression. At this, through the article which prescribes that all inherited social organizations and civil associations are obliged to bring into accord all its acts with the new Law on associations within six months and submmitt an application for re-registration, they have committed a killing of numerous non - profit and non - governmental organizations.
It is a realistic estimate that at least two thirds of them did not submmitt the application for registration within the prescribed period, and in accordance with the new law. By this, they have practically become illegal and exposed to the possibility of drastic financial penalty and prohibition of operation. Out of 25 thousand different associations, the number that is estimated to be operating in Croatia by the Center for the development of non - profit organizations, thousands of them must, if they want to continue with operation , to start from scratch, so that they would not feel on their skin the benefits of the state arm.
Source: Split weekly Feral Tribune, January 19, 1998