data we excluded the cases that clearly cannot be considered procedures for determining the date and place of birth and took into account only those procedures in which the court implemented Articles 71a- 71lj of the Law on Non-Contentious Procedure.8 According to the information obtained from the courts and in accordance with the aforementioned criterion, since September 2012 a total of 848 procedures for determining the date and place of birth were initiated in Serbia. Looking by year, most procedures were initiated in 2015 - 267 and slightly fewer procedures were initiated in 2014 - 232. By August of the current year, 122 procedures were initiated. Therefore, we can conclude that in the last three years, more or less the same number of procedures were initiated, with a tendency of slight decrease in the number of procedures. The majority of procedures were initiated before the courts in Kosovska Mitrovica (265 procedures), Bujanovac (117) and the First Basic Court in Belgrade (116). This means that as many as 59 percent of all procedures initiated in Serbia were initiated before these three courts. On the other hand, none of the procedures were initiated before 10 courts, while the number of procedures initiated before 25 courts varies from one to five. Therefore, more than half (56%) of the total number of courts that provided information had a maximum of 5 procedures. This concentration of procedures in certain courts could be explained by the earlier observed fact that the largest number of procedures for determining the date and place of birth are initiated for people who were born in Kosovo9, and one of the three mentioned courts with the largest number of procedures is in Kosovo, the second one is close to Kosovo, while the third court is in the place where the largest number of displaced persons from Kosovo settled. As regards the outcome of these procedures, in most cases the petitions were granted and decisions were issued on determining the date and place of birth – more precisely, in 68% of procedures. In 11% of the cases, decisions on the withdrawal of petition were issued, because the petitioners did not attend hearings. The petitions were denied in 6% of the cases and rejected in 4% of the cases. The remaining procedures were solved otherwise (decisions on termination or suspension of procedure, decisions on denial of jurisdiction, etc.). The analysis of received court decisions has revealed that the procedures for determining the date and place of birth were not conducted only in cases of legally invisible persons. In fact, the procedures for determining the date and place of birth of deceased persons were conducted before a significant number of courts (15). These procedures were initiated mainly by the heirs of deceased persons for whom it was not possible to obtain birth certificates, mainly for the purpose of exercising property rights. Even more courts (23) conducted procedures for the persons born abroad. Very often these were the persons born in the republics of former Yugoslavia, who were registered in the later destroyed civil registry book, and the persons born in other countries, but who could not obtain a birth certificate in those countries. Given that the Law on Registry Books provides that the citizens of Serbia born abroad shall be registered in birth registry books on the basis of a foreign birth certificate in an administrative procedure, and if they cannot obtain a foreign 8 These Articles regulate the procedure of determining the date and place of birth. In 74% of the cases of determining the date and place of birth initiated by Praxis by mid-2015, the petitioners were internally displaced persons from Kosovo; see: Analysis of the Late Birth Registration Procedures, Praxis 2015. 9 8