Parents of missing babies at a protest in Belgrade: Our fight has lasted too long

The parents of the missing babies organized a protest rally in Belgrade’s Republic Square with the aim of once again drawing public attention to the fate of the children, who they believe were abducted after birth and then sold or given up for adoption.

They also met to ask the competent Serbian institutions to clarify the circumstances in which their children disappeared.

“We are outraged, we are angry, we are sad, we are disappointed, we are lost people, people without justice,” he said in a statement to Radio Free Europe after the protest, Ana Pejić de Ruma, secretary of the Vojvodina Association of Parents of Missing Babies, who herself has been searching for decades for an answer about the fate of a girl who gave birth in August 1988 in a maternity hospital in Sremska Mitrovica, who was told she died two days after giving birth.

The Fact-Finding Law on the Status of Newborn Children Suspected of Disappearance from Maternity Hospitals in Serbia entered into force on March 11, 2020 and Article 17 stipulates that the deadline for initiating legal proceedings is six months. from the effective date.

The main objections parents made to the law is that it offers financial compensation to parents, rather than answering what happened to their children.

The protector of citizens of Serbia, Zoran Pasalic, said on September 11, the day the legal deadline for initiating legal proceedings to establish the facts about the missing babies expired, should be extended by more than a month and a half the time that the state of emergency imposed by the COVID-19 epidemic lasts. , because in that period, by decree of the Government of Serbia, all time limits in judicial proceedings stopped running.

From the moment the law was passed, the parents of the missing babies consider that everything that happened is “stretching and buying time,” Ana Pejić told RSE.

“This struggle and uncertainty of ours has been going on for too long. Absolutely nothing has moved, there are no legal proceedings, there is no case. All of this was done for the purpose of postponement, counting that we are all in our old age and that we will soon forget where we were born and not how we gave birth, “said Pejic.

Serbia was obliged to pass a special law, which would be the legal framework to solve all cases of “missing babies”, according to the 2013 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in the case of one of Zorica Jovanović’s mothers.

The verdict handed down by the European Court of Human Rights against Serbia in 2013 in the case of Zorica Jovanovic, who sued the State because she did not receive an answer to the question of what happened to the baby that she was told who died in Cuprija’s maternity hospital for more thirty years. the day after the birth, it was a turning point.

The verdict ordered that the issue of missing children be systematically resolved, and the bill was in the Assembly nearly six years after the expiration of the deadline that Serbia received from the Council of Europe.

In Serbia, more than 2,000 parents, gathered in associations, seek the truth about babies born two, three or more decades ago, who were told in maternity hospitals that they had died, which they suspect, because many of them have never received bodies of children. no supporting documentation.