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After the II World War, Yugoslavia began to build a new socialist society and economy. However, the facts that political power belonged to revolutionary forces and that a majority of the economy was in the hands of domestic and foreign owners were impediments to this process. The clash between these two forces prompted the new political structures to undertake the implementation of economic reforms, laid down already in the war period. This basically implied the harmonisation of the political sector and the economic sector in order to ensure the undisturbed functioning of the state. As a means to this end, the confiscation was used to accumulate the state treasury assets, i.e. to build up the initial national property fund. It is this very legal instrument that was used after the II World War to seize most of the property which is today subject to repatriation or indemnification procedures. At the time, there were several bodies which administered justice over persons who breached the provisions of the relevant regulations or imposed, among other severe punishments, the punishment of property confiscation. Among them, the courts for the protection of national dignity of Croats and Serbs in Croatia played the key role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]