Understanding of the concept of criminal procedure in the new Law on Criminal Procedure of Serbia
In this paper the author has outlined that the solutions introduced in the new Law on Criminal Procedure of Serbia concerning the concept of criminal procedure, its structure and scope are confusing and wrong. In his opinion those mistakes have caused the largest number of other wrong solutions in the new Law, especially in regulation of presentation of evidence. Unlike the former pre-criminal proceedings, which was constantly and justifiably considered to be with no criminal procedural effect, the new Criminal Procedural Law treats even the police "pre-investigation" and prosecution investigation as parts of the criminal proceedings and enables that verbal evidence (statements of the witnesses and accused) presented in those administrative proceedings can be used later for rendering the judgment in the later criminal proceedings. The author has demonstrated that by introducing the prosecution investigation instead of the judicial one investigation is not part of the judicial criminal proceedings anymore and that therefore principals of directness and contradictoriness in the main proceedings should have been more elaborated than before in the new Law, in stead of making them questionable by introducing number of new exemptions. According to the Law on Criminal Procedure the new criminal procedure now consists of the non-judicial investigation and judicial main criminal proceedings. In the field of legislature, this change has raised two major issues before the legislator: (1) to secure protection of human rights in the non-judicial investigation and (2) to secure court judgment that will be based on the evidence, presented according to the rules of contradictoriness and directness, in the judicial part of the criminal proceedings. Based on these requests, the evidence presented in the non-judicial previous proceedings cannot be used, in author's opinion, for rendering the judgment although the new Law allows that, even in a broader sense comparing it to the time when the investigation was a judicial activity.