Basic models of building pre-trial investigation as a stage of criminal proceedings in foreign countries

Abstract

One of the main areas of development of criminal procedure legislation has been, and still is, the differentiation of criminal proceedings into pre­trial and trial stages. The author notes the current trends in national criminal procedure legislation aimed at optimising the procedure for investigating criminal cases and reducing the timeframe for their investigation. The desire for democratisation of the criminal procedure doctrine, strengthening of the guarantees of admissibility of evidence, adversarial process, and changes in the process model itself, along with the fundamental trends in the development of the rule of law, have led to a large-scale adoption of foreign criminal procedure institutions.
 The authors examines the main models of pre­trial investigation as a stage of criminal proceedings in the countries with the Anglo-Saxon (England, USA) and Romano-Germanic (France, Germany, Switzerland) legal systems. Given the materials studied, it is noted that when building models of pre-trial investigation of criminal proceedings, regardless of the system of law used in different States, the legislator focuses on improving two areas: criminal procedure and criminal law. The criminal law criterion is responsible for determining a more moderate sentence by reaching an agreement between the prosecution and defence. The criminal procedural criterion, in turn, defines two more areas of change: the possibility of reducing the procedural timeframe of the proceedings in a certain part or in general; reducing the procedural obligations of persons involved in criminal proceedings. The authors come to the conclusion that it is necessary to modernise the current model of the pre-trial stage of the national criminal procedure with due regard for the positive experience of the most developed Western countries.