The 2012 CPP-K Amendment to the Slovenian Code of criminal procedure introduced pretrial hearings to the Slovenian criminal justice system and specifically, the possibility for an accused to plead guilty at a pretrial hearing or as part of a plea agreement with the prosecution.
This legislative amendment was adopted in order to reduce the number of case backlogs in Slovenian criminal courts and hence to improve the efficiency of criminal proceedings. However, its introduction into Slovenian criminal procedure has raised concerns regarding the delicate balance between judicial efficiency on the one hand and protecting fundamental constitutional rights of accused on the other.
The CPP-K Amendment changed the role of the parties in Slovenian criminal procedure. It has introduced further adversarial elements into Slovenia's mixed adversarial-inquisitorial criminal process which is based on the rules of the continental legal system. As a result, the role of a judge has now become less active than it was prior to the changes and the prosecutor's powers in the pretrial process have expanded.
The following paper consists of a short presentation of the Slovenian and English pre-trial phases in criminal proceedings and offers a comparison of both. It also points out the parts of the CPP-K Amendment that are incompatible with the nature of Slovenia's criminal procedural system and presents my own findings on the consequences of Slovenia taking further steps towards an adversarial criminal process.
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