Diversion of the criminal procedure vs. adequate criminal policy in the field of financial crime in Serbia

Kostić, Jelena and Matić Bošković, Marina (2022) Diversion of the criminal procedure vs. adequate criminal policy in the field of financial crime in Serbia. In: Restorative Justice, Mediation and Protection of EU Financial Interests Proceedings of the DRAMP Conference University of Perugia, 28-29 April 2022. University of Perugia, Perugia, pp. 153-173. ISBN 978-8-8994901-3-3

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Abstract

As the candidate country for the EU membership, Republic of Serbia has access to EU pre-accession funds for more than two decades. To effectively protect the financial interests of the European Union, Serbia is also obliged to prescribe sanctions for conduct that caused harm. For some of these criminal offences it is necessary to prescribe stricter criminal sanctions, that could improve the effectiveness of general prevention and prevent the possibility of criminal prosecution becoming obsolete even before such an act is detected by the competent authorities. Furthermore, the statute of limitations in the national legislation for financial crimes is extremely short and due to the complex procedure in detecting the irregularities, often expires before initiation of criminal proceedings. According to legal framework the deferred prosecution is possible for criminal offenses for which prescribed sanctions are fine or up to 5 years of imprisonment. Although this effectively ends criminal proceedings, the use of institutes to divert criminal proceedings has a limited scope, since the offender is not included in the criminal registry, and he does not plea. When it comes to crimes that harm the financial interests of the EU, deferred prosecution should take into account caused damage or the illegally spent money when deciding of the measure that will be proposed. Starting from the legal theory and application of the legal-dogmatic method in this paper authors try to make a proposal for improving both national legislation and practice, to ensure effective protection of the EU financial interests as well as national financial interests with which they are closely linked.

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