Autor: Edit SZENTPÁLI
Publicat în: Journal Of Eastern European Criminal Law no. 2/2019
Revistă disponibilă: aici.
Abstract: The pursuit of acceleration of legal proceedings in the Hungarian procedural law has been observable for long. In the past decades several European countries have implemented new laws to reduce the time required by litigations. In the Hungarian procedural law, preparatory meeting introduced by Act XC 2017 is intended to fulfil the economy goals in court proceedings. To achieve the targets the court, the prosecution and the defence should be able to interpret and put the law in practice in a consistent way. During both the negotiation over the preparatory meeting and the court proceeding, the accused’s confessions play a key role, for the simplification of the process is based on, after all, the sentences by which the accused plead guilty to avoid imprisonment and losing freedom, which would be the most painful for them. In case of criminal proceedings initiated owing to budget fraud, the accused usually plead guilty if – considering the volume of the financial loss caused by them – the prosecution proposes suspended imprisonment. Therefore, if the loss exceeds 50 million forints, the prosecution proposes mandatory prison sentence and the case shall be solved within the framework of standard judicial processes.
Keywords: admission of guilt; acceleration of procedures; budget fraud; preparatory meeting; preparation for hearing; cooperation between the accused and the defence counsel.
