The speech of Mariarosaria Guglielmi, President of MEDEL, at the Congress of the Portuguese association Sindicato dos Magistrados do Ministério Público (SMMP), Ponta Delgada, S. Miguel, Azores, March 2nd, 2024
The independence of Prosecutors in Europe (speech) (.pdf 250kb)
“There have been times and places in which the central protagonist of criminal justice, the officials most responsible for the fairness and effectiveness of penal administration, have been judges. Today the pivotal figures in criminal justice systems throughout the world appear, more and more, to be prosecutors”.
With this foreword, Máximo Langer and David Slansky introduce the contributions edited and collected in their volume Prosecutors and Democracy.
In recent years, these are the two keywords around which debate has unfolded about Public Prosecution and the pressing questions arising from its ever-growing role and discretionary power as well as from its crucial positioning vis-à-vis the overall functioning of the justice system and the Rule of Law: what are the necessary guarantees and the minimum standards of external and internal independence that the role of Prosecutors in a democracy requires? Which are the necessary checks and balances in terms of legitimacy and accountability?
