This doctoral dissertation examines the role of the injured party in the Slovenian criminal procedure. It focuses primarily on the position of the injured party in the narrow sense, as someone who participates in criminal proceedings as an active procedural subject alongside the state prosecutor, who performs the prosecutorial function ex officio.
The focus of the research, which is placed in the field of criminal procedural law, is on the analysis of the participatory rights of the injured party. These are all of the rights that enable the injured party to participate actively in the criminal proceedings and thus to influence the final outcome of the decision on the charges. The research also touches upon the service rights that ensure that the injured party is informed, assisted, and protected, thus facilitating his/her experience inside (and outside) the criminal proceedings. These rights do not allow the injured party to directly influence the outcome of the criminal proceedings, but by their nature may nevertheless prejudice the defendant's procedural position.
The main aim of the doctoral dissertation is to establish the position of the injured party in domestic criminal proceedings. To this end, the role of the injured party is analysed in historical, constitutional, positive and comparative law dimensions. The research seeks to establish how the understanding of the role of the injured party has changed over time, what the contemporary trends are in its development, and what the position is of the injured party in the current legal framework of criminal proceedings following the adoption of the amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act of 2019 (ZKP-N). The positive law analysis covers the role of the injured party in standard (traditional) criminal proceedings, but also includes an examination of summary and simplified procedures, and peripherally, alternative ways of resolving criminal cases. The comparative law analysis aims to explore how the injured party's procedural role compares with that of injured individuals in the criminal proceedings of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Croatia, and Canada.
The secondary objective of the doctoral dissertation is to determine whether the traditional conception of criminal procedure as a bipartite relationship between the state and the accused is changing in our legal system as a result of the enhanced role of the injured party. The discussion addresses the question of whether and how the dynamics between the main procedural subjects are changing due to the inclusion of an additional procedural subject in the design of domestic criminal proceedings. At the same time, the most acute dilemmas facing the current legal order are addressed, and concrete proposals for improving the domestic criminal procedural code are offered.
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