Preliminary Investigation and Suspect’s Right of Defense Through the Filter of Fair Criminal Trial. Critical Issues and Analysis De Iure Condito

Abstract

The attention that canonical criminal law has attracted in recent years due to scandal of sexual abuses, culminating in the recent reform of Book VI of the Codex of 1983, has constituted a driving force for analyzing the stability of the procedural apparatus of the Church with respect to the requests coming from modern secular legal systems. The phase most exposed to deficits in terms of guarantees seems to be that of the preliminary investigation, since the suspect is deprived of some of the basic protections imposed by the trappings of a fair trial: the right to a lawyer, a coefficient of dialogic participation with the proceeding authority and procedurally knowledge of the charges against him/her. The analysis of the system’s critical issues in terms of the suspect’s lack of involvement represents a necessary crossroads to grasp the solicitations so that functional solutions can be found to enrich the institution of the preliminary investigation with legal coherence and procedural guarantees.