Research project SE/D6/01 (Research action SE)
Many signs indicate that in Belgium today, the criminal justice system is undergoing a legitimacy crisis (i.e. an authority crisis). Essentially, this
crisis is explainable from the citizen's perspective by gradual loss of confidence in the efficacy, equity, and certainly also the integrity of penal
justice administration. These are social cohesion factors whose value should never be underestimated. Among the combined elements leading
to this crisis can be mentioned: increasing pressure on the criminal justice system due to inflation of criminal legislation and rising criminality; the
incapacity, both organisational and conceptual, to handle the resulting case overload via a strategy making it possible to decides cases in a
consistent, rational manner that meets the standards of the law, criminalistics, and policy, and which warrants that criminal justice practices will
be efficient and fair; the disproportion between the work to be done and the work it is possible to do (overload), causing frustrating shortcomings
in the search for criminals and the elucidation of serious criminal cases; selectivity that can no longer ensure equality in the administration of
justice; the increasing impossibility of bringing prosecution proceedings to their conclusion "within a reasonable time", and the resulting
uncertainty for both offenders and victims.
The focus of the project is entrusting completion of (non-trial) criminal proceedings to the department of the public prosecutor. Justice
is studied from two different angles: comparative and theoretical on one hand, criminalistic and sociological on the other. Besides analysing
the completion strategy itself (by studying case inflow, file preparation, file completion on a representative sample of prosecution departments
chosen on the basis of their morphological characteristics), the project also pays attention to the theoretical, legal, and institutional context of
the justice system and of the infrastructure in which proceedings are conducted. The project examines in particular how the intervention of
the public prosecutor's department can contribute -through its interaction, defined de facto or by standards or to be defined, with the other actors
of the criminal justice system (citizens, lawmakers, the people handling the cases, the police)- to relieving the bench of the burden of criminal
proceedings. It also examines how the load on the prosecution department itself can be alleviated, while taking care to preserve the correct
handling of cases and/or adequate administration of criminal justice.
The project's focus takes account of the key position occupied by the public prosecutor's department within the criminal justice system; how it
operates thus largely determines the quality of criminal justice administration, so that the legitimacy crisis affecting the system as a whole
inevitably also concerns the (dys)functioning of the prosecution service.
To ensure in practice that the study is pertinent and to optimise the extent to which the results are exploited and implemented, the various stages
of the study are critically examined by a representative group of users. This group will include magistrates, representatives of the police forces, barristers, academic personalities, and will serve as a sounding board.
