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SAPV Adoption Act 1976 - legal mechanism map

Primary legal source and normative benchmark for assessing the disputed 1979 adoption, later identity substitution, and the forced assimilation imposed on a child of Hungarian-Croatian origin within a chain of institutional continuity borne today by the Republic of Serbia.

Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina 1976-09-28
Document record for the 1976 Law on Adoption of SAP Vojvodina. In this dossier it functions not as a neutral statute entry but as the normative yardstick against which the disputed 1979 adoption, identity substitution, suppression of minority-origin continuity, and later institutional conduct are measured. Original PDF and language-specific translation assets are attached separately.
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Related evidence

Revision of 29 May 2026: the appellate judgment confronted with the 1976 law and the identity evidence
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The original 1976 law permits direct checking of the revision’s distinct arguments about conditions, consent cross-references, indissolubility and changes to identity records. Each actual article cited is mapped separately.

The lawfulness of the full adoption of 21 June 1979 must be assessed under the substantive law in force when that adoption was established. That law is the 1976 Adoption Act of SAP Vojvodina. The lower courts had to assess the contested act against the conditions for full adoption then in force, not against subsequently devised justifications, general formulas or a present-day interest in maintaining the act’s consequences. The central provisions in these proceedings are therefore: - Article 30; - Article 31; - Article 34; - Article 35; - Article 37; - Article 38; - Article 40; - Article 41; - Article 42; - Article 2 of the Adoption Act of SAP Vojvodina. ### 2. The second-instance court incorrectly applied Articles 30 and 41 of the Adoption Act of SAP Vojvodina Article 41 SAPVAA expressly provides that full adoption is void if, when it was established, the conditions in Article 30(1), (2) and (4), and Article 31 of that Act, were not fulfilled. Correct application of Article 30 was therefore central to the decision in this case. The Court of Appeal did not apply Article 30 correctly. It effectively neutralised that article. Instead of determining whether this case fell under paragraph 1 or paragraph 4 and checking fulfilment of that paragraph’s conditions, the court wrote that the conditions “had in any event been fulfilled”. Such a construction is not an application of the law. Article 30(1) and Article 30(4) govern different legal situations. Article 30(1) concerns a child below the age of five whose parents are dead or unknown, or have abandoned the child and whose whereabouts remain unestablished after six months from abandonment. Article 30(4) concerns the situation where one parent is dead or unknown; in that situation full adoption may be established only with the other parent’s prior consent. These two provisions are not interchangeable. They do not prescribe the same prerequisites.
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