Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RevACLaw (Revamping Anticorruption Criminal Law – Strategies and Consequences)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-03-01 do 2023-08-31
RevACLaw’s objectives are the following:
(A) unveiling the revamping strategies and how they interact in three fields of law (substantive criminal law, procedural criminal law, mutual legal assistance in criminal matters), and conceptualising this new way of conducting justice as a social practice, (B) delivering both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the accessibility of the resulting settlements, and (C) analysing case-making and the occurring narratives of corporate corruption and anticorruption law enforcement.
These objectives will be achieved by a novel interdisciplinary approach, including both legal and empirical socio-legal research. The project will impact the fields of legal theory as well as the study of law and society with regard to a present-day phenomenon.
Initial findings result from legal comparative analysis of the transnational anti-corruption settlement systems as installed in the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland, and the case law respectively. The RevACLaw research team was able to reveal how criminal justice systems are struggling when it comes to identify and integrate victims of transnational corporate corruption. Our research shows that victims do not have a role in settlement procedures. Explicit de lege ferenda regulations would be favorable. Further research is, however, needed, notably in view of the determination of damage and potentially adequate legal constructions allowing the integration of victim states in non-trial settlement procedures. It is to be considered an important research topic, as in the future, authorities of states whose public officials have been corrupted, thus being on the demand side of corruption, are increasingly seeking to participate at non-trial settlements too in order to also benefit partly from the value of the confiscated assets and the money generated by the fines.
A general finding of the RevACLaw project so far is, that the choice for either formalization or informalization settlement procedures is reflected in law enforcement strategies. National legislators increasingly create explicit spaces for (more or less constrained) informality within settlement procedures, allowing negotiation and a high level of prosecutorial discretion. To give this fact more weight, work has been invested to edit a special edition of the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice on the ‘Politics of Informality in Criminal Procedures’. A call for paper has been published, papers selected, a workshop with the authors of the submitted papers held, reviewers searched, the editorial introduction written, and corrections controlled. The special edition ‘Politics of Informality in Criminal Procedures’ should be finally published in summer 2023 .