The Prosecutorial Monopoly of the Slovak Public Prosecution Service: No Access to Justice for the Injured Party?

Abstract

The recodification of criminal law realised in the Slovak Republic in 2005 brought several new elements to criminal proceedings. One of them was the expansion and significant strengthening of the discretion of the public prosecutor in criminal proceedings. However, this authority of the public prosecutor’s office is, in many cases, perceived sensitively and controversially in Slovak society, especially in connection with many cases and scandals, when the prosecutor simply stated that ‘the act did not occur’. One of the related problems is the fact that the injured party in the Slovak Republic has essentially no powers that would, independently of the prosecutor’s office, ensure the control of the prosecutor’s discretionary powers directly through an independent and impartial court. This situation also stems from the fact that the public prosecutor’s office has a prosecution monopoly in Slovak criminal proceedings. However, the current prosecution monopoly of the prosecutor’s office is not a rational consequence of its historical development in our territory but a consequence of the coup d’état in 1948 and the subsequent onset of the communist regime. The possibility for other entities (e.g., the injured party) to exercise their rights through criminal law institutions has thus been minimised. Based on the above, the aim of this paper is to examine the existing scope of the discretion of public prosecutors in Slovakia, analyse the possibilities of controlling the exercise of these powers, and answer the question of how to improve the current possibilities of the control.

Keywords

• prosecutor’s office of the slovak republic
• public prosecution service
• prosecutorial monopoly
• injured party
• discretionary powers