Comparative Approach To Criminal Procedure Aspects

The chapter is a comparison of the national reports on rewarding measures linked to judicial cooperation in terrorism-related crimes (Italy, Germany, Belgium, Croatia, Spain, Luxembourg, and France) highlighting how there are persistent and deep divergences in national criminal justice systems, even among Member States of the EU. It focuses first on the different rules depending on whether or not the Member State has a specific history with either national (e.g. Italy, Germany, Spain) or international (e.g. Belgium, France, Croatia) terrorism. At the same time, there are still countries (e.g. Luxembourg) with little to no case law, which have been implementing supranational obligations and duties to criminalize certain conducts without perceiving the urgency other countries, hit by terrorist attacks, cannot forget. At the same time, it appears extremely hard to harmonize these norms among countries with discretionary and mandatory prosecution. In fact, countries whose criminal justice systems are based on the principle of opportunity wield discretionary dismissals more as one-size-fits-all measures and require less precise legislative interventions. However, some similarities also emerge, leading to potentially harmonizable aspects. This is particularly apparent when it comes to the probative value of repentants’ declarations: indeed, there is a rule of evidence in most Member States, in compliance with ECHR’s case law, stating that those statements require external corroboration from other sources of evidence.