Do Macedonian citizens have access to justice in the mass disputes?

Abstract

In the last ten years Macedonian civil justice system was faced with new types of disputes. These cases are characterized by affection of large part of the country’s population and they have challenged the country’s civil justice system. These cases differ significantly from the regular court cases due to their collective nature. These cases involve collective rights, while the “regular court cases” involve individual rights (“droit subjectif”). Basic features of these collective rights (also known as trans-individual rights in the Latino-American countries) are their size, their different nature compared to public and private rights, their heterogeneous object, their indivisible object and their indefinite entitlement. These collective rights challenge the traditional civil justice system because this system does not provide efficient adjudication and socially just results in the mass cases. Namely, it cannot be expected that the court will respect the principle of party autonomy in cases that involve millions of consumers. Those millions of consumers must be represented before the court on a representative basis, as the only possibly way for a mass case to reach the justice. On the contrary, no court may adjudicate one million separate litigations at once.  For adjudication of these mass cases, United States have class action mechanism, England and Wales have representative action and group litigation order mechanism, Sweden has group action.