The Human Rights Monitoring Institute has repeatedly focused its attention on the violations of human rights caused by the high-handed practice of the bailiffs and criticised the payment structure for bailiffs' work.
Gintautas Bužinskas, Minister of Justice, signed the Order for the reduction of fees for the court bailiff services. It prescribes the duty to initiate debt collection by the institutions imposing administrative fines (for example, the police). If debtor is unemployed, while refering execution to court bailiffs these institutions now are obligated to provide bailiffs with the document, issued by the State Social Insurance Fund Board and verifying that the debtor is unemployed and does not receive any retirement benefits. Thus, court bailiffs cannot be involved if execution is possible directly. This will safe debtors execution costs charged by court bailiffs.
Furthermore, in case of the execution of a fine below LTL 200, the court bailiff shall mail to the debtor a request to pay the fine and execution costs, which in this event may not exceed LTL 100. Earlier the costs to be covered by the debtor could amount to as much as a few hundreds of Lithuanian Litas.
Thus, debtors who failed to pay small fines would incur lower extra expenses. Till now for any fine under LTL 200 the bailiffs used to charge LTL 30 fee for the case administration and LTL 100 fee for the debt exaction. From now on, for the fines under LTL 50, the administration fee shall be reduced to LTL 20, while the bailiff’s fee will not exceed LTL 50.
In the event of directing the execution to the debtor’s property, the Minister has also revoked the bailiff’s right to distrain an item of higher value than is required for the compensation of both the exacted sum and execution fee.
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© 2012 Human Rights Monitoring Institute