Prosecution in Europe: Varying Structures, Convergent Trends

Chapter 2 of the European Sourcebook attempts to show the differences as well as the common features of the prosecution services of the Council of Europe Member States. In order to do so the following five categories of statistics were collected: the total number of cases the prosecuting authority recorded as having been dealt with within a particular year; the number of cases brought before a court; the number of cases dropped; the number of cases dropped conditionally; the number of cases ended by the imposition of a sanction. The prosecution statistics of the European countries studied vary because of differences in the input structures. They are also affected by variations in output structures. These are determined by the powers that the prosecution authorities themselves possess. These variations between the prosecution systems within Europe cause significant differences in the resulting statistics and must be borne in mind when analysing the European Sourcebook data.