Project Details
Projekt
Matrix of a structural reform of the criminal procedural law
Subject Area
Criminal Law
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556195125
The German criminal procedure law needs a reform. In the last ten years, a large number of reform laws with over 80 significant amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CCP) have come into force. However, beyond the legal-political slogans of “modernization” and “effectiveness”, there seems to be no discernible system, sense or stringency to this phase of reform. Rather, the legislative changes of the last ten years have been guided by theoretically and practically questionable ideas of efficiency or "focusing events" - the legislator's orientation towards highly stylized individual cases in the media. As a result, the CCP has failed to keep up with the practical development trends of the proceedings while maintaining a consistent renewal in many central areas. These include, in particular, large-scale proceedings with complicated and extensive facts, the systematic and systematic shift in the focus of criminal proceedings towards consensual termination of proceedings, as well as existing access asymmetries with regard to certain cessation formats. A large number of legal policy reform efforts serve to compensate for one-sided shifts in conflicts of objectives in criminal procedure, without succeeding in addressing key structural issues that precede concrete legislative proposals. The planned project aims to undertake a metaperspective and investigate which parameters and conditions for success are required in order to achieve a reform of the CCP that is reliable in terms of process theory and based on empirical basis. First of all, it serves to scientifically outline a superordinate perspective, which at the same time offers the possibility of subsequent legal policy references. This requires, on the one hand, a coherent consideration of intra-legal dynamics and, on the other hand, an opening to interdisciplinary influences on the structure and course of proceedings.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
