Simple trial in criminal procedure

The increase in the number and variety of crimes creates a severe workload on criminal justice systems in today's world. This workload makes it difficult to provide criminal justice in a reasonable time and thus decreases the efficiency of criminal justice systems. There are efforts to combat with negativities through the legal reforms in regard to norms of crime politics and judicial reforms to be realized within the mechanism constituting the criminal justice system. One of the legal reforms that has become prominent in the recent period is the adoption of special procedure principles, which are formed by skipping certain stages of the traditional proceedings in the resolution of criminal disputes, shortening the deadlines, and making the proceedings less formal without violating the fundamental guarantees. It is seen that these special procedures, which are also recommended in the resolution R (87) 18 of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, have been adopted by many countries under different names and procedures in comparative law. In our country, Articles 251 and 252 of the Code of Criminal Procedure numbered 5271 were amended with the Law No. 7188, and a new special procedure has been adopted as an alternative to the prosecution phase, which is called as simple trial procedure within the scope of aforementioned legal reform. This procedure, which aims to reduce the workload of the courts and the allocated effort and time to petty crimes by waiving the hearing in crimes that are considered to be summary offences in nature, closely share similarities with the provisions of the penal decree of judge sitting at criminal court of peace, which was issued in the abolished Criminal Procedure Code numbered 1412. It is understood that the simple trial procedure, which is an exceptional special criminal procedure specific to the prosecution stage, an alternative to the traditional trial, based on the tacit consent of the accused and the participant, implemented upon the discretion of the court, is the subject of many judications in practice, and that there are divergences over some issues about the institution in the copyrighted works. It is aimed in the Human Rights Action Plan prepared by the Ministry of Justice, to contribute to the effectiveness of the criminal justice system in our country through theoretical and practical examination of the simple trial procedure, which is aimed to be broadened in terms of scope, the determination of the problems and the introduction of some solution proposals regarding practice and legislation. In our study, simple trial procedure is elaborated in terms of its concept, legal nature, goal, examples within the comparative law, its historical development, implementation terms and forms, objections to a judgment constituted through this procedure, similar institutions and the right to a fair trial, its relationship with the standards developed in the resolution of European Court of Human Rights and its implementation within the scope of timeline.