According to a study by Ervin Belovics in 2015, courts most often used the trial by jury and the “trial by appeal” procedure. In the period under review, 18.7% of cases were prosecuted by way of a trial and 30.5% of cases by way of a motion for a mistrial. “It can therefore be concluded that in almost 50% of the cases brought before the courts, the prosecution used legal measures to speed up the proceedings.”3 However, the author also notes that, despite the frequent use of these instruments, the average duration of cases tried under the ordinary procedure has not decreased: “Most practitioners see the reason for this in the increase in certain types of crime, in particular those against intellectual property, those that damage the budget and those that damage the economy, but especially in their increasing complexity. In these categories of cases, it is almost always necessary to call in an expert and to process and analyse accounting and other documents and electronic data, which can sometimes run to tens of thousands of pages.”4

Botos has previously raised the possibility in Hungary of bringing the perpetrator to justice immediately in all cases of minor offences, following the French example. A short investigation report could be drawn up, including the names of the perpetrator and witnesses, the location and the method of the crime. The author added: “Although it sounds heretical, I must say that I would set up a system of on-call magistrates (as well as on-call prosecutor) in police stations and that in cases of fabrication, on the oral motion of the on-call prosecutor, the on-call magistrate could decide on the spot on the amount and type of sentence, which could be foreseen to be of a lesser duration. This decision could be appealed to the municipal courts by the prosecutor concerned, the accused and any defence counsel, and the municipal courts would also decide in a single judicial procedure on the merits or otherwise of the appeal, the correct type and severity of the sentence, and the admission of any additional evidence. The municipal courts could thus, as courts of appeal, also make a final decision.”5

I would have found the implementation of this idea somewhat problematic from the point of view of the principle of separation of functions, since the system of on-call duty at police stations would have given the impression that the administration of justice meant judgments were issued on the orders of the police. The work of the investigative and adjudicative bodies must not only be independent of each other, but must also appear to be so. A suspect who has already been convicted by the police may rightly feel that the principle of impartiality has been violated. Nor can I agree with the author’s view that in such fast-track cases, by overriding the system of legal remedies, district courts should be given the power to conduct appeal proceedings, let alone to make their decisions final and enforceable in the absence of any other ordinary remedy. I believe that the majority of single judges would not be able to cope with the complexity of a jurisdiction which would be one day fact-finding and the next day reviewing. To sum up, I do not believe that the referral to the courts requires any organisational restructuring, nor is there any need to impose any particular professional specialisation requirements on the professional actors in the proceedings.

I would like to note that in the context of the prosecution’s “obligation to provide evidence”, the prosecution is obliged to hand over to the court – even immediately before the trial starts – any material evidence that could not be in the court’s possession earlier due to the short time available or the novelty of the evidence. In my view, such evidence adduced at the last minute should not normally give rise to difficulties of assessment for the court or tribunal, but at most it should be examined whether the rules relating to the prohibition of evidence have been complied with.

The specific features of the negotiations are: