Venice commission: what type of authority? A look from Serbia

In this article, we ask whether the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters, can be treated as an instance of practical authority. In doing so, we proceed from the mainstream jurisprudential distinction between theoretical and practical authorities, challenging Raz’s claim that the former ‘do not have authorities over anyone’, and Himma’s claim that the point of utterances of the latter is to guide behaviour by telling subjects what they must do, and not merely what they should do. We argue that the key to detecting an authority relationship is the concept of recognition, as recently espoused by Roughan. After critically assessing her account, we use the example of the 2022 Serbian constitutional reform to demonstrate how the VC, as a seemingly theoretical authority in constitutional matters, was transformed into a full-blown practical authority, despite being equipped merely with advisory utterances of what should be done.