wp2007/2

Tom Vander Beken and Annelies Balcaen, Strafrechtelijke sanctionering van milieurecht: stroomschema van PV tot vonnis, Lawforce working paper 2007/2

The flow chart ‘from notice of violation to judgement’ discusses the different stages in the criminal procedure from the moment a notice of violation arrives at the Prosecutor’s Office until the moment a judge reaches a final verdict. Specific attention is paid to the different ways in which a case can reach the public prosecutor’s office, to the preliminary investigation run by the prosecutor and to the trial phase in which the judge comes to a verdict on the basis of the evidence gathered. For each phase of the criminal procedure, the actors involved are discussed, the procedure as such is analyzed and the different decisions that can be taken are elaborated. Furthermore, existing statistical data on the phases of the criminal law procedure are subjected to analysis.

Full paper (Dutch) here