The Public Prosecution Service

Prosecution and Diversion within Criminal Justice Systems in Europe

The project is completed. The first project wave was funded by the Frity-Thyssen-Stiftung, Cologne, and the AGIS programme of the European Commission, the second wave once again by the AGIS programme.
The project aimed to provide a comprehensive knowledge base as to the legal and factual role the public prosecution service plays in European criminal justice systems. It was assumed that the prosecution services, but in part also the police, are becoming more powerful as systems become increasingly overloaded. Prosecution services were examined from two perspectives:
1. From a criminological point of view: The prosecution service was regarded as a part of the criminal justice system as a whole, a system under a great deal of pressure to deal with ever rising numbers of cases in which the prosecution level is more and more becoming the decisive (de-)criminalization stage. This included an organizational-sociological point of view investigating how the prosecution services manage to deal with the rising number of cases and proceedings in terms of reducing their workload by means of simplified methods and proceedings.
2. From a legal viewpoint: This included various elements, in particular the criminal procedure angle in terms of regulating cases in accordance with the rule of law (which raised questions concerning the principles of legality/opportunity). Furthermore it required an examination of the protection provided for the accused person?s human rights.
The first wave of the project was supported by a network of experts of six European countries (England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden) and was prompted by experiences encountered during work on the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics. The follow-up study covered eleven countries (Croatia, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey in addition to the countries that already participated in the first wave).