On the organisation and structure of the prosecutor's activities in certain foreign countries

There are two main types of structure and activities of the prosecutor's office; they are a criminal prosecution authority (the prosecutor as a representative of the "prosecution"); and a law enforcement authority (the prosecutor as a "supervisor of legality"). The first type of the prosecutor's office historically stems from the judicial structure of the prosecutor's activities ("judicial magistracy"). In this case, the main activity of the prosecutor's office is related to ensuring justice, mainly in criminal cases, and the prosecutor's offices are the bodies of criminal prosecution and public (state) charges support. Recently, this type of the prosecutor's office provided a basis for a new developing one, which is "the prosecutor (prosecutor's office) as a representative of justice". The prosecutor's activities are mainly associated with the administration of criminal justice, similarly to the basic type; but the fundamental difference is that the basic model regards the prosecutor as the main engine of criminal proceedings, since the initiation and subsequent application of the criminal law rules depend strictly on the person, while the new one provides the right to initiate criminal procedure for other participants in criminal proceedings, and the list of them can be quite extensive. The charging and prosecutorial activities of the prosecutor become inferior to the legal assessment of the procedural activities of other participants in the criminal procedure. This makes the role of the prosecutor similar to the one of an "assistant judge". The second type of "prosecutor's office as a body of supervision of legality" historically derives from the judicial-administrative and fiscal-supervisory nature of the prosecutor's activities structure. Its main goal is to supervise (monitor) the legality, which is understood as the fulfillment of the requirements set out in the laws (as the acts of the highest legal force) that is aimed at achieving the lawful state of the supervised environment. All other functions, including criminal prosecution and supporting the charges, are subordinate to the main one and are either determined by it, or regarded as of a secondary nature. Prosecutor's supervision covers the activities of all public authorities, institutions and persons, including other control, enforcement and judicial authorities. In this regard, the prosecutor's office acts as a supreme supervision body possessing only external features of an institution of justice and is quite often referred to as a law enforcement body that has the right to apply substantial legal coercion measures in a simplified (out-of-court) manner. Currently, this type of prosecutor's activities tends to transform into a new one that can be conventionally defined as "the prosecutor's office as a rights enforcement body" (and the prosecutor, respectively, as an "ombudsman" or "the rights defender"). The principal difference from the basic model is that the traditional notion of legality as the main subject of prosecutor's activities becomes subordinate to public interest, which implies protection and securing of public goods, values and social relations rather than enforcement of the requirements set out in the law.

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