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Teka Commission of Legal Sciences Polish Academy of Sciences Branch in Lublin

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2018)

Articles

Protection of Individual Rights in the Field of Criminal Law of Slovak Republic

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32084/tekapr.2018.11.2-28  [Google Scholar]
Published: 2018-12-31

Abstract

If we want to talk about the issue of protection and respect for fundamental human rights in the legal environment of the Slovak Republic from the point of view of criminal law, I believe that the right which deserves special attention in this regard is the right to personal freedom and also the related right – right to health and life. I have decided to deal with this right and with the issue of its violation in the context of a specific criminal-law legal tool, namely pre-trial detention (custody). The reason for analyzing this legal measure is relatively simple. I believe that the custody represents one of the most radical interference with the personal freedoms and rights of the individual. The importance of this measure and its impact on the life and health of the persons can be demonstrated on the number of suicides committed during stay at custody. It must be noted that pre-trial detention is, in the comparison with the custodial sentence, only a temporary restriction of personal freedom, but in this regard it is necessary to emphasize that while in the case of imposed sentence we are talking about a person in respect of whom the court has already adopted the decision about his or her guilt on the basis of sufficient amount of evidences, in the case of pre-trial detention the principle of presumption of innocence is still applied. In other words, the person placed in custody is still regarded as innocent under the principle in question. The pre-trial detention cannot replace the prison sentence, even though such a punishment will probably be imposed on the accused at the end of the criminal proceedings. Custody does not have a sanctioning character in the sense of the Criminal Procedural Code, because it is explicitly only an act of detaining character and in comparison with the punishment of imprisonment it is a completely different independent criminal-law tool. In addition, it is appropriate to emphasize that criminal prosecution against an accused placed in custody is very often ended with an acquittal decision. Because of this reason I consider the issue of respecting for the right to personal freedom in the context of pre-trial detention as a very sensitive problematic that deserves a special attention.

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