Serbia

Serbia's digital-accessibility regime sits on a three-layer foundation: a dedicated disability-rights statute that predates EU candidacy, a general anti-discrimination act that hosts the country's independent equality body, and an EU-accession-driven body of secondary legislation that approximates the Web Accessibility Directive and prepares the ground for the European Accessibility Act. Article 21 of the 2006 Constitution (Устав Републике Србије) guarantees equality before the law; Article 81 obliges the State to take special care of persons with disabilities. Serbia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities together with its Optional Protocol on 31 July 2009, and has held EU-candidate status since 1 March 2012 — a status that brings directive-alignment obligations under the negotiating framework even before formal accession.

The constitutional and treaty floor

The 2006 Constitution of the Republic of Serbia (Устав Републике Србије) opens its catalogue of rights with an equality clause that names disability explicitly. Article 21 guarantees that "all are equal before the Constitution and the law" and prohibits direct and indirect discrimination on any ground, including physical and mental disability ("забрањена је свака дискриминација, непосредна или посредна, по било ком основу"). Article 81 then adds a positive-obligation clause: the State, autonomous provinces, and local self-government units "shall take care of, support, and facilitate the equality of persons with disabilities in political, economic, cultural, and other public life." Read together, the two articles establish both a negative non-discrimination duty and a positive accessibility duty at constitutional level — a structure the Constitutional Court has invoked in reviewing administrative decisions under the disability-rights statutes.

Serbia is a bi-script country: under Article 10 of the Constitution, Cyrillic is the official script in administrative use, with Latin co-official under the law. Legal acts are promulgated in Cyrillic in the Official Gazette (Службени гласник Републике Србије) and frequently republished in Latin transliteration; both forms are equally authoritative for citation. Throughout this dossier, primary citations are given in Cyrillic per the constitutional convention.

Serbia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, together with its Optional Protocol, on 31 July 2009. The convention entered into force for Serbia on 30 August 2009. Article 9 (accessibility) and Article 33 (national implementation and monitoring) are the international-law anchors most frequently invoked in Serbian policy documents. The CRPD Committee's Concluding Observations on Serbia's combined Second and Third Periodic Reports flagged community-based services, inclusive education, accessibility of the built environment, and digital-services accessibility as priorities — themes that the 2023 e-government accessibility decree and the National Strategy for the Improvement of the Position of Persons with Disabilities address directly. The Protector of Citizens (Заштитник грађана) is the designated Article 33(2) independent monitoring mechanism.

The headline statute: the 2006 Law on the Prevention of Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities

The Law on the Prevention of Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities (Закон о спречавању дискриминације особа са инвалидитетом, ZSDOI) was promulgated in Official Gazette 33/2006, amended in 2009 to bring it into line with the freshly-ratified CRPD, and amended again in 2016 to tighten its accessibility-of-services provisions. The act predates Serbia's EU candidacy and remains the country's cross-cutting disability-rights instrument: it covers public services, employment, education, healthcare, the built environment, transport, and what the act calls the "information environment" (информационо окружење) — language that pre-dates and now plainly encompasses digital services and websites.

Three operative obligations sit at the heart of ZSDOI. First, a general prohibition on direct and indirect discrimination on the basis of disability. Second, an explicit duty to provide reasonable accommodation (разумно прилагођавање) in employment, education, and access to services — a duty the 2016 amendments reinforced by clarifying that the failure to provide accommodation is itself an act of discrimination unless the responsible party can demonstrate disproportionate burden. Third, a duty to ensure accessibility of public services and facilities, including online services delivered by public authorities and providers of services of general interest. The act assigns oversight to the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality and to the Protector of Citizens, with parallel civil-court routes for damages claims.

The general framework: the 2009 Anti-Discrimination Act

The Anti-Discrimination Act (Закон о забрани дискриминације, ZZD) was adopted in 2009 (Official Gazette 22/2009) and substantively amended in 2021 (Official Gazette 52/2021). It is Serbia's general equality statute, covering all protected characteristics — disability among them. The act created an independent equality body, the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality (Повереник за заштиту равноправности), which sits in the Belgrade office of the same name and is appointed by the National Assembly for a five-year term.

The Commissioner has a quasi-judicial mandate: receiving and investigating complaints, issuing opinions on whether discrimination has occurred, issuing recommendations to respondents, and — where recommendations are ignored — issuing public warnings and notifying the public. The 2021 amendments expanded the Commissioner's procedural powers, in particular by clarifying the burden-of-proof allocation (the complainant must make out a prima facie case; the burden then shifts to the respondent to show that the differential treatment was justified) and by allowing the Commissioner to bring strategic litigation in the courts on behalf of identified victims and in cases of broad public significance.

The Commissioner's caseload includes a steady stream of digital-accessibility complaints. Decisions in 2023 and 2024 against major retail banks, mobile-network operators, and several units of state administration are now part of the published opinion record on the Commissioner's website, and have produced administrative-fine recommendations in the RSD 50,000–500,000 band (≈ €425–€4,250), parallel orders to remedy the inaccessibility within a fixed period, and — in two cases — public warnings escalated after non-compliance with the original recommendation.

The accession-driven layer: the 2023 e-government accessibility decree

Serbia is not a member of the European Union, but as an EU candidate it has committed under the negotiating framework — particularly under Chapter 19 (Social Policy and Employment) and Chapter 23 (Judiciary and Fundamental Rights) — to progressive approximation of the EU acquis on disability rights. Two directives are at the centre of that approximation programme: Directive (EU) 2016/2102 (the Web Accessibility Directive, WAD) on public-sector websites and mobile applications, and Directive (EU) 2019/882 (the European Accessibility Act, EAA) on products and services in the private sector.

The Government Decree on the Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications (Уредба о приступачности веб-сајтова и мобилних апликација), adopted in 2023 by the Government of the Republic of Serbia, is the central WAD-aligned secondary instrument. The decree applies to public-sector bodies — central administration, autonomous-province bodies, units of local self-government, public enterprises, and bodies exercising public authority — and pegs the conformance bar to the European harmonised standard EN 301 549 (currently in force at version 3.2.1, which integrates WCAG 2.1 Level AA). It imposes three substantive obligations familiar from the WAD: a conformance duty, an obligation to publish a structured accessibility statement, and a feedback-and-complaint mechanism. Supervision sits with the Office for IT and e-Government (Канцеларија за информационе технологије и електронску управу, ITE), which maintains the national e-government portal and the registry of accessibility statements.

The EAA-aligned framework is at an earlier stage. The Government's accession action plan signals legislative approximation of the EAA through a combination of amendments to the consumer-protection framework and dedicated secondary legislation on product-and-service accessibility, with primary legislation expected on the negotiating timeline rather than the 28 June 2025 EU application date. In practical terms, this means that businesses placing products on the Serbian market and providing in-scope services to Serbian consumers face an evolving compliance landscape over 2026–28, with the formal regime expected to take its mature shape as accession negotiations advance.

Sign language and reasonable accommodation in administrative practice

The Serbian Sign Language Law (Закон о употреби знаковног језика), promulgated in Official Gazette 38/2015, recognises Serbian Sign Language (српски знаковни језик) as a fully-fledged means of communication and obliges public bodies — courts, prosecutors' offices, healthcare providers, educational institutions, social-service providers, and units of state administration — to ensure sign-language interpretation when communicating with deaf and hard-of-hearing service users. The Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs administers the relevant funding lines and maintains the register of qualified interpreters. The law is also routinely invoked in the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality's decisions on access to public services and on the accessibility of broadcast media, with several Commissioner opinions in 2023–24 turning on the absence of sign-language interpretation on public-service broadcasts and emergency announcements.

Technical standards and conformance

The technical anchor for accessibility conformance in Serbia tracks the EU harmonised standard EN 301 549 via the 2023 e-government accessibility decree. EN 301 549 imports WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its baseline web-content conformance requirement and adds further requirements for mobile applications, native software, non-web documents, hardware, and communications functionality. Serbia is a member of CEN-CENELEC through its national standards body, the Institute for Standardization of Serbia (Институт за стандардизацију Србије, ISS), and has adopted EN 301 549 as a national standard (SRPS EN 301 549) — meaning that the technical requirements are directly invocable in Serbian administrative practice and in court proceedings.

The Office for IT and e-Government's implementation guidance under the 2023 decree fixes the conformance bar at WCAG 2.1 AA pending the formal update of EN 301 549 to track WCAG 2.2. The guidance document models the accessibility-statement template on the Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523 form, adapted to Serbian-language and Cyrillic-script requirements. Monitoring methodology — simplified scans across the in-scope population and in-depth scans of a smaller tranche — follows the structure of Commission Decision (EU) 2018/1523, even though Serbia is not formally bound by that decision pre-accession.

Penalties — the exposure stack

A common pitfall in compliance budgeting for Serbia is to treat the headline administrative-fine ranges in ZSDOI and ZZD as the totality of exposure. They are not. The administrative-fine layer is the floor of a four-layer exposure stack: (1) administrative fines under ZSDOI and ZZD; (2) civil discrimination damages, uncapped under Serbian tort law; (3) Commissioner-issued recommendations, warnings, and follow-on strategic litigation; and (4) public-procurement disqualification on serious-misconduct findings. Figures below are presented in RSD (the primary statutory currency) with EUR reference figures at the National Bank of Serbia indicative rate (≈ 117 RSD / EUR as of mid-2026).

Layer 1 — administrative fines under ZSDOI and ZZD

Both ZSDOI and ZZD operate a tiered administrative-fine structure with separate ranges for legal entities (companies, public bodies, associations), responsible persons within legal entities (managers, compliance officers), and natural persons in their personal capacity. The upper tier is reserved for repeated or systemic violations and for breaches affecting a class of consumers or service users.

By EU comparison, Serbia's top-tier fines sit well below the levels seen in member states that have transposed the EAA — Germany's BFSG caps at €100,000 per incident, Spain's Ley 11/2023 reaches €1,000,000 for "very serious" infringements, and the Netherlands has signalled exposure of up to 5% of annual turnover for systemic violations. This gap is expected to narrow as Serbia approximates the EAA framework on the accession timeline; the negotiating chapters on social policy and fundamental rights anticipate revisions to the penalty schedules to satisfy the EAA's Article 30 requirement that sanctions be "effective, proportionate, and dissuasive."

Layer 2 — civil discrimination damages (uncapped)

Beyond the administrative-fine track, complainants under both ZSDOI and ZZD may pursue parallel civil claims in the general courts for material and non-material (moral) damages. Serbian tort law sets no statutory cap on non-material damages; the courts assess them by reference to the severity of the breach, the duration of the discriminatory conduct, the size and resources of the respondent, and the broader public-interest implications of the case. Awards in disability-discrimination cases over the last decade have typically fallen in the RSD 100,000 – 500,000 range (≈ €850 – €4,250), with a small number of high-profile cases reaching RSD 1,000,000+ (≈ €8,500+) where the discriminatory effect on a class of users was well-documented or where the respondent's conduct was particularly egregious.

Layer 3 — Commissioner-issued recommendations, warnings, and strategic litigation

The Commissioner for the Protection of Equality is empowered under the 2021 amendments to ZZD to issue formal recommendations to respondents found to have engaged in discrimination, to publish public warnings where recommendations are ignored, and to bring strategic litigation in the courts on behalf of identified victims and in cases of broad public significance. The reputational consequences of a published Commissioner opinion or a public warning routinely exceed the administrative fine that accompanies them — a pattern especially pronounced in the banking, telecoms, and retail sectors, where the Commissioner's findings are picked up by Serbian media and by international human-rights monitoring bodies.

Layer 4 — public-procurement disqualification

The Serbian Public Procurement Act (Закон о јавним набавкама) — substantially amended in 2019 to approximate the EU Procurement Directives — allows contracting authorities to disqualify bidders that have been found to have committed serious professional misconduct. The category includes adjudicated discrimination findings under ZSDOI and ZZD and significant administrative-penalty decisions. For vendors selling into the Serbian public sector, the loss of bid eligibility on an active procurement (typical contract values run RSD 50 million – several hundred million RSD, ≈ €425,000 – several million euros) routinely exceeds the administrative fine that triggered the disqualification by one to two orders of magnitude.

Enforcement record and outlook

Enforcement under ZSDOI and ZZD has been moderate but visibly accelerating since the 2021 amendments expanded the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality's procedural powers. The Commissioner's published 2024 annual report records a year-on-year increase in disability-related complaints, with digital-accessibility cases — inaccessible mobile-banking applications, inaccessible municipal e-government portals, inaccessible e-commerce checkouts, and the absence of sign-language interpretation on public-service broadcasts — forming a distinct and growing case-stream. The Protector of Citizens has paralleled this pattern with a series of own-initiative inquiries into the accessibility of central-administration websites and electronic-services platforms.

Public-sector enforcement under the 2023 e-government accessibility decree is still in its first full surveillance cycle. The Office for IT and e-Government has published a first-cycle simplified-scan tranche covering several hundred in-scope websites and has flagged a list of priority remediation targets among central-administration portals. The substantive penalty mechanism under the decree is, by design, soft-touch in the first cycle — corrective-action orders rather than administrative fines — but the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality's parallel jurisdiction under ZZD provides a harder edge where public-sector bodies fail to engage.

EU-accession-driven reform is the strongest forward signal. Chapter 19 (Social Policy and Employment) screening identified the accessibility regime as an area requiring further approximation, particularly on the EAA side and on the penalty-schedule "effective, proportionate, and dissuasive" test. The Government's accession action plan anticipates EAA-approximation legislation across 2026–28, with the precise instrument — a standalone act on the accessibility of products and services, or substantive amendments to ZSDOI and the consumer-protection framework — to be settled during the negotiation phase.

What's coming in 2026–28

Four concrete developments to watch. First, the EAA-approximation primary legislation expected on the accession timeline — the most consequential reform in the Serbian accessibility landscape since the original 2006 ZSDOI. Second, the Office for IT and e-Government's second-cycle WAD-aligned monitoring round, expected to produce the first significant tranche of corrective-action orders and (where applicable) referrals to the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality. Third, the next periodic CRPD report by Serbia, due to the CRPD Committee in 2027, which will measure progress against the Concluding Observations on community-based services, inclusive education, and digital accessibility. Fourth, the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality's strategic-litigation programme — under the 2021-amended procedural powers — is expected to produce its first set of leading judgments on digital-inaccessibility-as-discrimination during 2026–27, setting case-law parameters for the Commissioner's administrative-fine recommendations going forward.