Legal cooperation between the USSR and Yugoslavia: history of development

Abstract

Introduction. The processes of global international integration have been proceeding at a rapid pace over the past decade. The economies of the states are becoming more globalized and merging into a common market. The nations cooperate more and more actively in the cultural field. Educational opportunities nowadays are virtually limitless. All these phenomena became possible thanks to the powerful international legal framework formed during the previous historical stages which continues to improve. One of the most relevant areas of interstate cooperation is cooperation in the legal sphere, which is based on a set of universal conventions and bilateral treaties on legal assistance. Agreements on legal assistance entered into the practice of interstate relations in the Soviet period, when approaches to their structure and content, the mode of their mutual performance were worked out. The article is devoted to the legal cooperation between the USSR and Yugoslavia, the international legal regulation and to the issues of implementation therof. Such retrospection allowed us to understand the processes of succession in international law, their impact on the current state of legal assistance between Russia and the former Yugoslav republics. Materials and methods. The methodological basis of the study is the dialectical method of cognition of phenomena in the relationship and mutual conditionality augmented by a set of General and particular scientific methods of cognition. The historical method contributed to the restoration of the chronological sequence of the phenomena and facts. The method of actualization made it possible to identify the historical factors that determined the peculiarities of international cooperation in the legal sphere. The method of diachronization made it possible to identify certain successive stages in the development of international legal cooperation between the USSR and Yugoslavia, to compare them, to identify patterns of development. Results . In the framework of the study, the author found that the relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia were relatively short and unstable. The diplomatic relations between the countries were established only in 1940, after the end of the Second World War, they were almost frozen several times. This led to the fact that the Treaty on legal assistance in civil, family and criminal cases was concluded only in 1962 and was in force until the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. This Treaty is of fundamental importance for the legal cooperation of the modern states that came into existence after the collapse of the two Federations. Russia, Serbia and Croatia have been the legal successors of the 1962 Treaty since 1992. During the following decade Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Macedonia also assumed the obligations of the former Yugoslavia for legal cooperation with Russia as the legal successor of the USSR. Discussion and Conclusions . The international legal framework for the provision of international legal assistance in civil, family and criminal cases between the USSR and Yugoslavia is studied. The role and importance of the Treaty on legal assistance concluded by these USSR in 1962 for the modern practice of legal cooperation between Russia and the successor countries of Yugoslavia are analyzed.