Police and Security, Vol. 21 No. 3, 2012.
Professional paper
The Legal System Development of the Most Severe Security Measures of the Defendant's Presence in Criminal Proceedings and the Statistical Analysis of Arrest Enforcement in the Rebublic of Croatia
Hrvoje Filipović
; Police Academy, Zagreb, Croatia
Marijan Šuperina
; Police Academy, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
This paper analyses the most severe security measures of the defendant’s presence in criminal proceedings according to the Criminal Procedure Act from 2008 with its amendments. These are: arrest, custody and investigative detention. In the analysis of these measures a historical or generic method was used to monitor the development of the legal system of analysed mea-sures. A scientific method of the analysis of legal norm content was used concurrently in or-der to identify every change or constant in the legal system (for example, conditions for appli-cation, duration etc.) of every single measure through the amendments of Criminal Procedure Act (2009 and 2011).
Arrest, custody and investigative detention, as measures which considerably cover and limit guaranteed rights and freedoms of every man, were analysed through legal standards adopted in the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia and European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as well as legal practice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Croatia and European Court of Human Rights.
The paper emphasizes the necessity of complying with the clause "rebus sic stantibus" by which the court and other national authorities (state attorney, police), when making decisions on security measures of the defendant's presence in criminal proceedings, take care ex officio not to apply a more severe measure if the same aim can be achieved by a milder measure. Furthermore, the court and other national authorities are obliged ex officio to abolish the security measures of the defendant in criminal proceedings when conditions for their applica-tion cease to exist or to substitute them with milder measures if legal conditions for imple-menting more severe measures stopped and if there are conditions to achieve the same aim with a milder measure.
In the second part of the paper a statistical analysis of detainees in the Republic of Croatia for the period from 1 September 2011 to 30 June 2012 was made. The analysis includes dispersi-on of persons arrested in police departments of Ministry of the Interior, month by month in the observed period as well as diffusion of detainees by legal description of the criminal of-fense (according to Criminal Law and special and special criminal legislature) on the occasion of which the arrest was made, and by the age and gender of the detainees.
Keywords
arrest; custody; pre-trial detention; custody officer; police custody unit; Criminal Procedure Act; police officer; police action
Hrčak ID:
94772
URI
Publication date:
23.12.2012.
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