THE IMPORTANCE OF SECRET SURVEILLANCE OF COMMUNICATIONS IN DETECTION AND PROVING THE CRIMINAL OFFENSE OF EXTORTION

Abstract

On the one hand, the crime of extortion is a conventional criminal offense; on the other hand, taking into account the highly specific level of organization, it is a modern criminal act. Such a stance has been justified by the statutory provisions incriminating the qualified forms of this criminal offense which is committed by organized criminal groups. Bearing in mind that our legislator has enacted different measures for combating organized crime, Serbian legislation includes specific measures and investigative techniques aimed at counteracting this type of crime. In addition to traditional methods which have now become part of regular evidentiary actions, the 2011 Criminal Procedure Code precisely regulates the former special investigative techniques, which are now part of special evidentiary actions. In this paper, the authors analyze one of the six prescribed special evidence-gathering actions - the secret surveillance of communications and its application in detecting and proving the criminal offense of extortion, particularly considering that the legislator explicitly prescribed the circle of offenses that may be subject to applying the special investigative measures whose scope of application includes some of the qualified form of extortion. Finally, the authors point to possible modifications of the legal provisions on the secret surveillance of communications, which should be precisely regulated in order to improve the procedural application of this special investigative measure in detecting and proving the criminal offense of extortion.