Appeal of 18 March 2026: nullity, unanswered evidence and the second adoption

Full English translation of the supplied twelve-page appeal. Pages 1–11 contain the author’s pleading; page 12 reproduces the judgment-mailing envelope. Its visible entries are transcribed separately as editorial text. Original qualifications and legal arguments are preserved. The appeal is dated 18 March 2026; no court filing stamp is visible in this copy.

Original appeal and envelope · 12 pages

Source page 1

TO THE BASIC COURT IN NOVI SAD
for the
APPELLATE COURT IN NOVI SAD

Case: P2.1435/24

Plaintiff / appellant:
Milan Petrović (born as Milivoj Miletić)
Kraljevačkog bataljona 110, Kragujevac

Defendant:
Centre for Social Work of the City of Novi Sad
Zmaj Ognjena Vuka 13–17, Novi Sad

Source page 2

APPEAL

against the judgment of the Basic Court in Novi Sad in case P2.1435/24

I challenge in its entirety the judgment of the Basic Court in Novi Sad in case P2.1435/24, delivered following the main hearing concluded on 9 February 2026, which I received on 13 March 2026, on the grounds of:

substantial violations of the provisions of civil procedure;
an incorrectly and incompletely established factual situation;
incorrect application of substantive law;
an incorrect decision on the costs of the proceedings.

I propose that the Appellate Court in Novi Sad:

primarily, vary the challenged judgment and grant the claim in its entirety;

alternatively, set aside the challenged judgment and remit the case to the first-instance court for a retrial.

I. SUMMARY OF THE GROUNDS OF APPEAL

The challenged judgment did not refute my arguments or examine the core of the dispute. Instead, it effectively treated the defendant’s internal documentation and narrative as self-sufficient proof of truth and legality. The court thereby failed to exercise genuine judicial scrutiny of the contested conduct, and instead retroactively verified its lawfulness.

The court did not clarify how I came within the authority of the guardianship body at all before 21 June 1979; did not genuinely apply Article 30 of the SAP Vojvodina Law on Adoption of 1976; did not clarify the basis on which my mother’s consent was bypassed; did not assess Vera Radovanović’s conflict of interest; did not clarify the relationship between probate proceedings O.196/79 and the adoption proceedings; and did not explain how a second adoption in 1984 was possible after a full adoption allegedly lawfully established in 1979.

It is particularly important that the court effectively disregarded my key submissions, especially those of 30 June 2025, 27 October 2025 and 12 January 2026, which specifically raised and documented the decisive questions in this dispute in detail. The judgment does not show that those submissions were genuinely considered, only that they were formally present in the file.

II. INTRODUCTION

What was disputed in these proceedings was not the existence of certain documents. The dispute concerned whether those documents actually showed that all statutory requirements for full adoption were met in 1979; whether the body conducting the proceedings had lawful authority; whether there was a lawful substitute for the consent of a known and living mother; whether the proceedings were conducted impartially and in the child’s interests; and how the same system could arrange another adoption of the same child by another couple in 1984.

The challenged judgment does not give complete, clear and verifiable reasons addressing those questions.

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Consequently, this case involves not merely a retrospective assessment of a historical act, but also an assessment of the present institutional maintenance of its consequences, including consequences for the plaintiff’s identity, origins and legal continuity as a person.

The first-instance court formally cited certain statutory provisions, then accepted that the guardianship body had already established fulfilment of the requirements, and inferred the lawfulness of the records from their very existence. Such an approach is not judicial scrutiny of the contested conduct, but retroactive institutional verification of its result.

The judgment is therefore methodologically and legally weak: it accepts uncritically, remains silent, skips over matters and reaches conclusions where it was required to explain.

III. SUBSTANTIAL VIOLATIONS OF THE PROVISIONS OF CIVIL PROCEDURE

1. The judgment lacks valid reasons concerning decisive facts

The challenged judgment contains no complete, specific and verifiable reasons addressing the key questions on which the lawfulness of the decision directly depends, particularly:

how the minor Milivoj Miletić came within the authority of the guardianship body before 21 June 1979;
by which specific act, on which date and on the basis of which facts that authority was established;
how the alleged authority of the Self-Managing Community of Interest for Social Welfare in Novi Sad fits with the Municipal Court in Novi Sad’s letter of 20 July 1979, directing the Secretariat for Veterans’ and Disability Affairs and Social Welfare, as the guardianship body, to appoint a guardian to protect my rights and interests in the probate proceedings;
the relationship between probate proceedings O.196/79, appellate proceedings Gž 11/80 and the 1979 full-adoption proceedings;
the legal significance of divorce file P-1642/76 and the traces of acknowledgment of paternity by Pavle Lakatoš;
the legal basis on which my mother’s consent was replaced;
how the same person, Vera Radovanović, could construct the case, recommend the adopters, be appointed as special-purpose guardian and then consent to the adoption;
how, after a full adoption allegedly lawfully established in 1979, another adoption of the same child could be carried out in 1984.

Moreover, the judgment nowhere states whether it legally brings this particular case within Article 30(1) or Article 30(4) of the SAP Vojvodina Law on Adoption, nor which specific facts satisfy the elements of that paragraph. Nor does it state the date of the alleged abandonment of the child, the date on which the search for the mother began, the specific steps taken in that search, or evidence that the statutory six-month period had elapsed before 21 June 1979. Without this, the reasoning concerning fulfilment of the requirements for full adoption remains not merely incomplete, but internally unverifiable.

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The judgment gives no genuine reasons addressing any of these questions. Instead, the court uses general formulas stating that the guardianship body “established” the requirements “in the preliminary proceedings”, and that the court established lawfulness “beyond doubt”. These are not reasons for a judgment, but a bare declaration.

It is especially significant that the first-instance court incorporated into the reasoning of the challenged judgment the fact that the plaintiff was adopted again in 1984 by another couple, without explaining that fact in legal terms. The court thereby incorporated into its own reasoning a fact that destabilises its own conclusion that the full adoption in 1979 was lawfully and permanently established, and then left that fact without any legal analysis. Such reasoning is internally contradictory and does not permit a proper examination of whether the challenged judgment is correct.

2. The court did not answer the plaintiff’s decisive arguments in his submissions

During the proceedings, in my submissions of 30 June 2025, 27 October 2025 and 12 January 2026, and in my testimony at the hearing of 15 October 2025, I raised the decisive points of the dispute precisely, repeatedly and with documentary support.

In the submission of 30 June 2025, I specifically raised the question of how authority was acquired, the relationship between the probate and adoption proceedings, and the fact that the full adoption was carried out before the body had a clear legal basis for such action.

In the submission of 27 October 2025, I identified in detail which files and acts the court had to obtain, why they were relevant and which legal issues they clarified, particularly concerning divorce file P-1642/76, probate file O.196/79, authority, the mother, paternity, the second adoption in 1984 and identity.

In the submission of 12 January 2026, I connected the probate proceedings, the child’s status, the question of the guardianship body, the Monitoring Sheet, Vera Radovanović’s role, the second adoption in 1984, the adverse psychologist’s assessment of the Petrović couple and the continuity of unlawful conduct.

The judgment does not show that it substantively answered any of those submissions as a central body of argument. It does not engage with their reasoning, discuss their key points or rebut their central assertions; instead, it bypasses them and formally covers them over. This violated my right to have the court genuinely decide the arguments I presented, rather than merely take formal note of them.

Furthermore, the judgment does not show why my decisive arguments and attachments were rejected; it shows only that the defendant’s assertions and documentation were accepted.

3. The judgment does not demonstrate a genuine assessment of the attachments and evidence the plaintiff had already placed in the file

Besides the arguments in the submissions themselves, the decisive facts and corresponding evidence had already been physically placed in the file through attachments to my earlier submissions and to the claim itself. This applies particularly to parts of probate file O.196/79, parts of appellate proceedings Gž 11/80, divorce file P-1642/76, civil-register extracts and other attachments that I expressly relied on and specifically identified as decisive for clarifying the guardianship body’s authority, paternity, the mother and consent, and the relationship between the probate and adoption proceedings.

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The challenged judgment does not show that the court genuinely and critically assessed those attachments. On the contrary, the reasoning indicates that the documents the court actually relied on substantively in reaching its decision were primarily the defendant’s internal acts and the adoption documentation, while the plaintiff’s decisive attachments were either passed over in silence or reduced to mere formal presence in the file without a genuine evidentiary assessment.

The judgment thus remained incomplete and selective in its assessment of the evidence, because it does not show why or how the court rejected or suppressed the plaintiff’s decisive attachments already present in the file, which directly concern the lawfulness of the challenged adoption.

It is particularly methodologically wrong that the court effectively equated the authenticity and official provenance of the documentation with the truth of its contents. That is not a genuine assessment of evidence, but a presumption of lawfulness in favour of the body whose conduct is the very subject of this dispute.

4. The court did not answer the plaintiff’s decisive arguments in his testimony of 15 October 2025

At the hearing of 15 October 2025, I explained in detail:

that I do not know the basis on which CSR acquired authority over me;
that on 20 July 1979 the court requested the appointment of a guardian to protect my rights in the probate proceedings, not for adoption;
that Vera Radovanović was both the special-purpose guardian and a person participating in the adoption proceedings;
that the full-adoption proceedings were accelerated immediately before my fifth birthday;
that the professional reports contradict each other;
that a second adoption was subsequently carried out in 1984.

The judgment did not genuinely consider those arguments. Instead, it flattened them through the general formula that my testimony was accepted only insofar as it was “consistent with the evidence to which the court gave credence”.

5. The judgment rests on circular reasoning

The court did not genuinely scrutinise the lawfulness of the contested proceedings. Instead, it wrongly treated the existence and formal authenticity of archive documentation as sufficient proof that the statutory requirements for full adoption had been met.

The court accepted the guardianship body’s internal documentation in advance as credible and sufficient, then accepted my testimony only insofar as it was “consistent with the evidence to which the court gave credence”.

The court thereby first gave priority to the very body whose conduct is in dispute, and then measured the truth of my testimony against that same documentation. Such an approach constitutes circular reasoning and shows that the court measured the contested conduct against neither the law nor external facts, but against the internal documentation of the body whose conduct was the subject of the dispute.

6. The judgment shows elements of formulaic reasoning

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Furthermore, the reasoning concerning the witnesses who were not heard shows elements of a formulaic approach. This further confirms that the judgment was not written with full attention to the actual course of the proceedings and the parties’ specific procedural actions.

IV. AN INCORRECTLY AND INCOMPLETELY ESTABLISHED FACTUAL SITUATION

1. The guardianship body’s authority was not established

The first-instance court considered a reference to the decision entrusting guardianship functions to the Self-Managing Community of Interest for Social Welfare in Novi Sad sufficient. However, this did not resolve the key question: whether, in this particular case and before 21 June 1979, a lawful, specific and documented basis existed for that entity to take over decision-making concerning the minor Milivoj Miletić and carry out a full adoption.

The court did not establish:

by which specific act authority was established;
when it was established;
on the basis of which facts;
how that alleged authority fits with the fact that on 20 July 1979 the Municipal Court addressed the Secretariat as the guardianship body for the protection of Milivoj’s inheritance rights.

The internal contradiction remained wholly unexplained between the body acting as the guardianship body for adoption in June 1979 and the body addressed by the court in July 1979 as the guardianship body for the protection of the same child’s inheritance rights.

2. The mother’s status was not properly established

The judgment accepts the narrative that my mother was at an “unknown place of residence” and was failing to fulfil her parental duties without justification, but does not establish:

which specific steps were taken to find her;
when those steps were taken;
whether the statutory period had elapsed;
the legal basis on which her consent was lawfully replaced by the consent of a special-purpose guardian.

Yet the judgment itself states that my biological mother is Cvita Miletić, giving her full identifying details. Thus, this was not an unknown parent, but a known parent whose whereabouts were alleged to be unknown. These are not legally the same situation and do not have the same consequences for the application of Article 30.

The judgment did not legally distinguish an unknown parent from a known parent whose whereabouts are alleged to be unknown, although the correct application of Article 30 depends on that distinction.

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In other words, the first-instance court formally cited Article 30 but did not establish the decisive facts without which that provision cannot be applied: neither the legal framework governing this particular case, nor the duration and course of the search, nor a lawful basis for substituting the special-purpose guardian’s consent for that of a known mother.

3. Pavle Lakatoš and the traces of paternity were not properly assessed

The court reduced the issue of Pavle Lakatoš to the simple observation that paternity had not been judicially established. This bypassed the substance of the matter.

The proceedings raised and documented traces showing that Pavle Lakatoš:

acknowledged the child in the context of divorce proceedings;
that the family knew of the child’s existence;
that I lived within my paternal family circle;
that I was staying with my paternal grandmother and grandfather;
that my status as the deceased’s son born outside marriage was discussed in the probate proceedings;
that at one point I was even declared an heir.

The court did not assess the significance of these traces for whether the administrative formula “father unknown” reflected the actual facts, or represented an administrative reduction of a more complex family and inheritance reality to facilitate full adoption.

4. Probate proceedings O.196/79 were not properly assessed

The probate proceedings were not incidental background, but one of the central pieces of evidence.

They contain:

the record of 19 March 1979, stating that the minor Milivoj was staying with his grandparents, namely the deceased’s parents;
the letter of 20 July 1979, requesting the appointment of a guardian to protect his rights and interests in the probate proceedings;
appellate proceedings Gž 11/80, showing that private heirs possessed information that full-adoption proceedings had taken place before SIZ and that the adopters had stated they did not seek for Milivoj to inherit from anyone.

The court did not explain how the same child could exist in one legal channel as Miletić Milivoj, a potential heir of Pavle Lakatoš, and in another as a child without parental care, ready for full adoption and the rewriting of his identity into another family.

Nor did the judgment explain why it did not consider that material decisive, although it directly concerns identity, inheritance status and the timing of institutional action towards the child.

5. The second adoption in 1984 was left without legal explanation

The judgment states that I was adopted by the Petrović couple in 1984 and was assigned their surname, but does not clarify how this was possible at all if a full adoption had already been lawfully established in 1979.

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The court does not explain how this fits with Article 40 of the SAP Vojvodina Law on Adoption, under which full adoption may not be dissolved; with Article 7 of the same law; or with the very logic of full adoption as a legal institution.

6. Vera Radovanović’s conflict of interest was not properly assessed

The file shows that Vera Radovanović simultaneously:

constructed a narrative of the mother as morally unfit;
relativised Pavle Lakatoš’s paternity;
kept the monitoring sheet and case report;
recommended specific adopters for me in particular;
was appointed as special-purpose guardian to give consent to adoption;
gave consent to full adoption;
and then participated in a new adoption cycle in 1984.

The court did not examine this as a problem, but merely noted the formal existence of a special-purpose guardian.

V. INCORRECT APPLICATION OF SUBSTANTIVE LAW

1. Incorrect application of Article 30 of the SAP Vojvodina Law on Adoption

The first-instance court formally cited Article 30 but did not apply it specifically to the established facts.

The court did not clarify whether it brought the case within paragraph 1 or paragraph 4 of that article.

If the case falls within paragraph 1, the court had to establish whether the parents were unknown, or whether the child had been abandoned and the parents’ whereabouts remained unestablished even after the six-month period had elapsed.

If the case falls within paragraph 4, the court had to clarify who was unknown or deceased, who the other parent was, and where that other parent’s prior consent was, or the legal basis on which it had been lawfully replaced.

None of this was done.

2. Incorrect application of Article 41 of the SAP Vojvodina Law on Adoption

The court reduced Article 41 to a declaration that no grounds for nullity existed, without genuinely checking whether the specific requirements of Articles 30 and 31 were met.

It thereby effectively left the guardianship body to act both as the creator of the contested act and as the measure of its own lawfulness, accepting that the body had already “established” this.

3. Disregard of Article 40 and the logic of Article 7

By mentioning the second adoption in 1984 without any legal explanation, the court disregarded the logic of the law then in force.

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The court was required to explain how a new adoption in 1984 was possible if a valid full adoption already existed in 1979, one that could not be dissolved under the law then in force. By failing to do so, it failed to apply substantive law to a decisive fact that directly undermines the conclusion that the first adoption was lawful.

4. Wrongly reducing the dispute to a mere family-law framework

The court treated the case as a typical family dispute, although it is a dispute against the guardianship body concerning the lawfulness of its historical and present conduct, identity, origins, inheritance status and the consequences of an administrative change of identity.

The first-instance court thereby wrongly marginalised the identity dimension of the dispute, although precisely that dimension determines a proper understanding of the legal significance of the contested adoption and the subsequent institutional maintenance of its consequences.

VI. INCORRECT ASSESSMENT OF EVIDENCE

The first-instance court did not critically assess the contents of the archive documentation. Instead, it effectively equated its formal authenticity and official provenance with the truth of its contents and the lawfulness of the conduct of the body that created it.

It accepted particularly uncritically the documents created by the very body whose conduct is contested.

Nor did the first-instance court critically assess the fact that the defendant’s internal documentation contains a degrading narrative permeated with value judgments and sex-based and cultural prejudices about my biological mother. Instead, it effectively accepted that content without genuine legal and evidentiary scrutiny. It thereby did more than uncritically adopt the defendant’s internal documentation: it indirectly provided a legitimising framework for descriptions contaminated by value judgments that could not be treated as a neutral and reliable basis for judicial conclusions.

The contradictions and problems concerning the following were not properly assessed:

the monitoring sheet of contacts and casework;
social worker Vera Radovanović’s report;
formulaic and mutually inconsistent professional assessments;
moral characterisations of the mother based on “consultation with neighbours”, without a serious evidentiary basis;
the fact that CSR’s own internal documentation confirms in several places that the child was well cared for, tidy, staying with paternal relatives and undergoing accelerated psychological preparation for an identity change.

In other words, the court did not compare and weigh conflicting evidence, but privileged the defendant’s internal documentation in advance.

VII. DECISION ON COSTS

I also challenge the decision that each party is to bear its own costs.

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The first-instance court unjustifiably reduced this dispute to the “regulation of family relations”, although it is a dispute against the guardianship body concerning the lawfulness of its conduct, identity, origins, inheritance status and the consequences of the contested full adoption.

VIII. INSTITUTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHALLENGED JUDGMENT

With this judgment, the matter no longer remained at the level of the historical conduct of the Centre for Social Work of the City of Novi Sad in 1979. It entered the sphere of its present institutional confirmation. The first-instance court did not limit itself to assessing an act from the distant past; in the present, under the authority of the Republic of Serbia, it adopted and confirmed the narrative of the body whose conduct was being challenged. The court thereby gave present institutional confirmation to the pattern of administratively erasing original identity and maintaining its consequences.

This is especially serious because this particular case concerns more than a dispute over the formal legality of a family-law act. It concerns the identity of a person whose established paternal family origins are Hungarian and maternal origins Croatian, whose original personal, family and national continuity was severed and administratively reshaped through the contested full adoption and the later acts that continued to maintain that situation. The challenged judgment therefore cannot be reduced to a routine decision in a local family dispute. It constitutes the state’s present institutional response to the documented assertion that a child’s original identity was unlawfully and administratively suppressed.

The fact that my key submissions effectively remained without a genuine answer gives this judgment particular weight. The court thereby showed not only that it accepted the defendant’s narrative, but also that it passed over, without substantive and reasoned engagement, detailed arguments that required it to address the very core of the dispute: the guardianship body’s authority, the lawfulness of replacing parental consent, the relationship between the probate proceedings and adoption, the second adoption in 1984, and the identity consequences of the contested act.

Furthermore, by adopting the defendant’s internal documentation without critical scrutiny, the challenged judgment indirectly institutionally verified the degrading narrative about my biological mother, although such a narrative could not be treated as a neutral basis for judicial reasoning. The judgment thereby went beyond procedural formalism: it institutionally confirmed the value framework through which the original unlawfulness had been justified and maintained.

Such conduct produces consequences extending beyond this individual case. It shows how today’s legal order treats the assertion that a child of minority, Hungarian-Croatian origin was administratively removed from his original identity, while the consequences of that act continue to be maintained through judicial and institutional protection. The challenged judgment therefore necessarily transcends local procedural routine and becomes a document of wider legal, academic and international significance.

For precisely this reason, the way the first-instance court handled this case matters not only to the parties, but also to a broader assessment of the ability of the Republic of Serbia’s judiciary to confront serious and documented claims of violations of the rights to identity, origins and continuity of personhood. A judgment that does not answer such claims with genuine reasons, but bypasses them, passes over them in silence or formally covers them over, does not remain merely a local judicial act. It also becomes evidence of

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how the state, through its present institutions, chooses to position itself towards the consequences of contested acts from the past.

In that sense, the challenged judgment matters not only for its outcome, but also for the message it sends about the state’s willingness or unwillingness to legally examine and remedy the acts that brought about the administrative severing of the original identity of a child of minority origin and the subsequent maintenance of the consequences of that severing.

IX. REQUEST

For all the reasons stated, I propose that the Appellate Court in Novi Sad:

primarily, vary the challenged judgment and grant the claim in its entirety;

alternatively, set aside the challenged judgment and remit the case to the first-instance court for a retrial and decision, directing that the renewed proceedings:

fully clarify the guardianship body’s authority before 21 June 1979;
clarify the relationship between probate proceedings O.196/79, appellate proceedings Gž 11/80 and the full-adoption proceedings;
apply Articles 30, 40 and 41 of the SAP Vojvodina Law on Adoption of 1976 precisely and specifically;
clarify the legal significance of the second adoption in 1984;
conduct a critical, rather than formal, assessment of the guardianship body’s documentation;
decide the costs of the proceedings anew.

Attachment 1:

Photocopy / printed depiction of the entire envelope of the Basic Court in Novi Sad’s court mailing in case P2.1435/24, addressed to the appellant Milan Petrović, with the visible designation of post office 21120 Novi Sad, barcode identifier RS740292178RS and postal stamp dated 12 March 2026, to prove the date of dispatch of the court mailing and the timeliness of this appeal.

Kragujevac, 18 March 2026

Appellant,
Milan Petrović

Source page 12

Attachment 1 — court-mailing envelope

Editorial transcription of the envelope image on this page; printed labels and visible entries are distinguished from unfilled fields.

Republic of Serbia. Basic Court, Novi Sad, Sutjeska 3, 21101 Novi Sad.
Form S4 (Civil Procedure Act / notice).
Case inscription: P2.1435/24, Judge VUJIĆ.
Mailing identifier and barcode: RS740292178RS.
Postage paid at post office 21120 Novi Sad.
Recipient: Petrović Milan, Kraljevačkog bataljona 110, Kragujevac, 34113 Kragujevac; postal address code 553626.
Round postal stamp: Novi Sad, 12.03.26.14. A handwritten “23” and another small handwritten mark are visible; the image does not explain their meaning.

Postal worker’s notes in the event of non-delivery: attempted delivery date and time; notice left at the residence/business premises, in the mailbox, affixed to the door, or in the post-office box. The date/time fields and all option boxes are unfilled.

Reasons why the letter cannot be delivered: recipient unknown at the address; address unknown; recipient moved; address insufficient; recipient deceased; recipient away. None of the options is marked.

The signature fields for the postal delivery worker and the employee returning the mailing are unfilled.

Editorial source connections

The witness proposals were already present in the original claim and maintained in the record of 26 March 2025. The final hearing record of 9 February 2026 contains a general withdrawal of other evidence proposals without naming witnesses; the judgment separately rejects examination of Vinka and Dragan Ignjatić. The appeal criticises the reasoning concerning unheard witnesses. These distinct source statements must be read together.

Original claim · 26 March 2025 record · Final hearing record · Challenged judgment

English translation