Chapter 7.5.

👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 7: The System of Litigation Law

7.5. Offences justice system -part 2-

As mentioned last time, if, after the investigation is completed, the suspect expresses his or her intention to contest the alleged facts, the process of clarifying the facts will be entrusted to the Truth Commission, a judicial body that specializes solely in clarifying the facts.

The Truth Commission is a deliberative body of five people: two lawyers (one of whom is the chairperson), one expert specializing in a field other than law, and two ordinary citizen representatives who hold delegate licenses to the Commons' Convention. It is a non-permanent body that is convened whenever necessary based on a request for the Tribune for habeas corpus.

Before the Truth Commission begins its deliberations, a preliminary screening is conducted to organize the evidence. The preliminary investigators inspect the evidence sent by the investigative authorities, and organize only the competent evidence that has been confirmed to be legal, and submit it to the Truth Commission. At that time, the preliminary investigators can summon and interview the suspect, witnesses, and other related parties as necessary.

Since the Truth Commission is not a judicial system to try criminals, but a system purely for clarifying the truth of a case, there are no public prosecutors as prosecutorial professionals, and suspects do not become "defendants" who have filed charges, but remain "suspects" throughout the process.

Thus, the Truth Commission's deliberations do not become an exchange of claims and proofs between the parties as seen in criminal trials, but rather focus on reconstructing the facts based on the evidence submitted. In such cases, suspects are merely summoned and interviewed as witnesses as necessary for the Truth Commission's deliberations.

However, when summoned and interviewed by the Truth Commission, all witnesses, including suspects, may request the assistance of a legally qualified attorney to assist them in their testimony, but the attorney may not testify on their behalf.

The Truth Commission's deliberations are in principle open to the public, but in the case of juvenile cases, they are open only to the parties involved, including relatives, victims, and independent observers selected from third parties.

Once the Truth Commission has completed its deliberations, it will issue a decision setting out the facts that have been clarified. This is equivalent to a verdict in a criminal trial, but rather than being presented in the form of a "guilty" or "not guilty" verdict, it is presented descriptively in the form of a report detailing the truth of the case. Therefore, if it cannot be definitively proven that the suspect is the real perpetrator, he or she will not be found "not guilty" but will instead be described as an unknown perpetrator.

Any suspect who is dissatisfied with the Truth Commission's decision may request a new deliberation from the Tribune for Habeas Corpus. In this case, a second deliberation will be held by members entirely separate from the first Truth Commission, and regardless of the conclusion of that hearing, a third trial cannot be requested.

If the Truth Commission's decision finding the suspect to be the true perpetrator is finalized, the case will then be referred to the Correction and Probation Commission, which decides on the treatment of offenders.

This Commission is a permanent institution composed only of experts in correction and probation, and decides on the most appropriate treatment after scientifically examining the details of the perpetrator's offence, offence history, personality traits, and mental and physical medical history. In the case of juvenile cases, a special review is conducted by the Juvenile Subcommittee of the Correction and Probation Commission, which is composed of experts on juvenile issues.

The Correction and Probation Commission's deliberations are held in private, but the respondent offender may have a lawyer or other person with specialized knowledge of correction and probation assist them as an attendant.

A party who is dissatisfied with the decision of the Correction and Probation Commission may request an appeal review by the Central Board of the Correction and Probation commission, which is the appellate board for the Correction and Probation Commission, but regardless of the conclusion of the Central Board, they cannot request a third trial.

Even after the decision has been finalized, the Correction and Probation Commission will be tasked with following up on the offender from the start of treatment to its completion, and will have the authority to renew treatment terms as well as the authority to supervise and correct the status of treatment implementation. This includes the authority to take necessary supervisory and corrective measures in response to complaints from offenders while treatment is being carried out.

To that extent, the Correction and Probation Commission can be said to be a unique judicial institution with a mission spanning two judicial areas: offences justice and civil protection justice, which is responsible for protecting human rights during the treatment implementation process.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 7.4.

👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 7: The System of Litigation Law

7.4. Offences justice system -part 1-

Offences justice system  refers to the field of justice system that aims to clarify illegal acts and take action against those who commit them. It is equivalent to criminal justice in capitalist society, but it is not called "criminal" because communist law does not have a penal system.

Needless to say, the starting point for offences justice  is the clarification of the facts of the offence, but while in the criminal justice process, the clarification of the facts and punishment are usually carried out together in the form of a criminal trial, in offences justice the process of clarifying the facts and the treatment of the offender based on them are clearly distinguished and completely separate. This is because the two processes are essentially completely different.

The beginning of uncovering the facts of an offence is a formal investigation by an investigative agency. Communist investigations are carried out by a dedicated investigative agency, not the police. With the abolition of the monetary economy, there is no class difference between rich and poor, and public safety would be maintained at an extremely stable level in a communist society, so there is no need for a powerful security agency such as the police, and in fact it does not exist (see my article).

If necessary to pursue an investigation, investigative agencies can request the issuance of an arrest warrant or search and seizure warrant from the Tribune for Habeas Corpus, a type of judicial position tasked with protecting the personal safety of citizens, and conduct a compulsory investigation. On the other hand, the Civil Patrollers, who are quasi-public servants whose main task is offence prevention, can also make arrests in the act of committing an offence without a warrant.

A suspect who is taken into custody is immediately summoned to habeas corpus for a public hearing. If it is determined as a result that continued detention is no longer necessary, the Tribune for Habeas Corpus must order the release of the suspect.

Incidentally, if a body is discovered that has died from an unnatural cause other than obvious illness, an autopsy is carried out by the coroner, a public professional independent of the investigative agency. The autopsy results are finally confirmed after a public hearing by a inquest presided over by the Tribune for Habeas Corpus.

Once the investigation is completed, the evidence collected by the investigative agency is temporarily sent to the tribune for Habeas Corpus. The tribune for Habeas Corpus will summon the suspect for questioning again, and if the suspect fully admits to the alleged facts, the case will be sent to the Correction and Probation Commission, which decides how to treat the offender. If the suspect denies all or part of the alleged facts, it will decide to convene the Truth Commission to clarify the facts.

If we compare this with traditional criminal justice, the procedure of indictment by a public prosecutor, which has been standard in the criminal justice process since the Napoleonic Code after the French Revolution, does not exist in communist criminal justice, and as mentioned above, it is a system in which the processes of investigation, fact-finding, and treatment are organically linked through the Tribune for Habeas Corpus.

Furthermore, minor offenses and juvenile delinquency that do not require any measure beyond a warning are dealt with by the Civil Patrollers issuing official written warnings as part of offence prevention activities, and formal investigations are omitted.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 7.3.

 👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 7: The System of Litigation Law

7.3. Economic justice system

Economic justice system refers to the area of ​​justice system that aims to resolve disputes over economic law. There are four areas of economic law: economic planning law, business organization law, labor relations law, and land management law, which is included in economic law in the broadest sense. The content and method of handling disputes vary depending on each area.

Among these, there is little room for disputes to arise regarding the Economic Planning Law. This is because economic plan is norm that are jointly formulated by the business organizations that are the subject of the plan through the Economic Planning Conference (hereinafter simply referred to as the "Planning Conference"). However, if a business organization violates the plan, the Planning Conference can request the suspension of production activities that violate the plan and sanctions against the officials and employees involved.

Such countermeasures and sanctions against violations of the plan are implemented through the Hearing Board which are established within the Planning Conference. The Hearing Board is an independent subsidiary body whose members are neutrally selected and whose decisions cannot be influenced by the Planning Conference, and the accused party is guaranteed an opportunity to defend and refute.

With regard to business organization law, disputes over management decisions between management bodies and worker representative bodies or cooperative members are anticipated. These are handled internally by granting quasi-judicial functions such as injunctions to auditing bodies. This is not an official judicial system, but rather a system that should be called intra-company justice, in which disputes are handled autonomously within the company.

Complex disputes that cannot be handled by auditing bodies are handled by a neutral corporate dispute arbitration committee made up of external lawyers, except in the following cases of labor disputes.

Labor disputes are expected to occur in relation to labor relations laws. However, since labor-management conflicts are sublimated in communist enterprises, serious labor disputes are not usually expected, but individual disputes over working conditions, etc. may arise between workers and their companies.

Such labor disputes are first handled by a labor arbitration committee, a third-party organization within the company. This is an arbitration body made up of lawyers with no vested interest in the company, and is also a type of intra-company justice system.

All enterprises, except for small-scale cooperative labor groups, are required to have a permanent labor arbitration committee, and labor disputes must first be arbitrated by the labor arbitration committee within the company, except for harassment cases in which a jump lawsuit to the Labor Tribune is permitted.

In most cases, the dispute is resolved at this stage, but if it is not resolved, it is left to public resolution by filing a lawsuit with the Labor Tribune. This is part of the civil protection justice system, which resolves labor disputes professionally. As will be explained again later, the decision of Labor Tribune is final.

The land management law, which has an intermediate position between civiv law and economic law, does not normally allow for disputes over land between private individuals, let alone between private individuals and public corporations. This is because in communism, land is an ownerless natural property that does not belong to any person, and each Zone manages it through a land management agency (hereinafter referred to as the "management agency").

However, private individuals can own buildings on land that are real estate for a specified purpose with the permission of the management agency, and can also transfer land use rights with the permission of the management agency However, if a dispute arises between a private individual and a management agency over such land use rights, it is resolved by the Land Use Rights Tribunal (hereinafter referred to as the "Land Tribunal"), an independent subsidiary of the management agency.

The Land Tribunal is a decision-making body made up of lawyers, and the management agency and the opposing party can each present evidence, present their arguments, and fight, but the decision of the Land Tribunal is final.

In addition, when a private individual occupies a specific parcel of land without the permission of the management agency, this constitutes illegal occupation, and in severe cases where violent or fraudulent means are used, the individual may be charged with violating the land management act and may be subject to offence proceedings as described in the next section 4.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 7.2.

👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 7: The System of Litigation Law

7.2. Civic justice system

Civic justice system refers to the area of ​​justice system that aims to resolve disputes over civic law. Civil law is composed of citizenship law and property rights law. The latter property rights law portion contains content equivalent to civil law in capitalist societies, and serves as the legal standard for resolving disputes over rights and obligations between private individuals.

However, as has been mentioned many times, in a communist society without a monetary economy, disputes over money do not arise in the first place, so most disputes can be resolved through negotiations between private individuals.

However, disputes that cannot be resolved through negotiations need to be resolved publicly by the judiciary. Arbitration by the Equity Commissioner is prepared as a judicial procedure to publicly resolve such civic law disputes.

This is similar to the settlement under the current judicial system, but there is a major difference in that settlement is a means to avoid a definitive judgment, whereas with the Equity Commissioner's arbitration, all cases are resolved through arbitration, without any definitive judgment in the first place. In civic law disputes involving non-monetary disputes, arbitration is more appropriate than adjudication.

The arbitration procedure by the Equity Commissioner is initiated by the petition of one or all of the parties to the dispute, and the parties present evidence and present their respective arguments. In that sense, it has elements similar to a trial.

The Equity Commissioner examines the arguments of the parties and the evidence on which they are based, and presents an appropriate arbitration proposal from a neutral standpoint. The arbitration ends when all parties accept the proposal. As long as there is a party that does not accept the proposal, arbitration continues, and there may be several arbitration proposals.

The arbitration by the Equity Commissioner has final effect, and a final arbitration proposal cannot be overturned unless new evidence is found that would change the arbitration result. However, if new evidence is found that would change the arbitration result, re-arbitration may be conducted at the request of a party.

The provisions regarding the arbitration procedure by the Equity Commissioner are included in the civic law, and a separate law such as the civil procedure code is not enacted.

In contrast to the above, the citizenship law portion of the civic law has a strong public law character and concerns rights and obligations that are not likely to become the subject of disputes between private individuals, and is therefore not subject to the arbitration procedures of the Equity Commissioner. If a dispute does arise in this area, it will be subject to civil protection justice as a human rights relief case, which we will look at later. 

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 7.1.

👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 7: The System of Litigation Law

7.1. Communist litigation Laws

In capitalist society, the ultimate embodiment of the monetary economy, disputes and crimes over money occur constantly, so a strong judicial system is essential to quickly and compulsorily adjudicate disputes in a broad sense, including crimes. This is usually done through an authoritarian institution called the court, and various procedural laws exist that define the details of the trial procedure.

In contrast, in a communist society where the monetary economy is abolished, disputes and crimes over money will naturally disappear. However, if conflicts are an inevitable part of human society, the need for judicial power to publicly handle the disputes that still inevitably arise will not disappear.

However, in that society, the necessity for judicial trials is no longer necessary, and therefore there is no need for a system of courts that authoritatively adjudicates lawsuits. A more flexible and non-authoritarian judicial procedure for resolving communist disputes is sufficient, and such a procedure is also more effective for resolving them. To get a rough idea of ​​these communist judicial procedures, one may recall that they are similar to the various systems of non-contentious procedures and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) procedures that are implemented as a supplement under the current judicial system.

Laws that serve as the basis for judicial procedures that do not rely on the formula "judicial proceedings = trials" can be collectively called "litigation law," but of course this is not a single law; they are broadly categorized by type of dispute, with individual procedural laws established for each.

To list them, they can be broadly divided into six areas: civic justice, which deals with civic law disputes; economic justice, which deals with economic law disputes; offences justice, which deals with the clarification and treatment illegal acts; civil protection justice, which deals with human rights relief and complaints against public authorities; impeachment justice, which deals with impeachment cases of public officials; and jurisprudence justice, which deals with the interpretation of laws and regulations, including constitutional review to examine violations of the Charter of the Commons' Convention. In the following sections, we will look at each of these six judicial areas individually.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 6.6.

👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 6: The System of Offences Law

6.6. Juvenile treatment systems

Communist offences law, which does not have a penal system, relativizes the distinction between treatment for adults and treatment for juveniles, so there is no need to prepare a separate juvenile law.

However, the extreme policy of treating adults and juveniles completely equally is not adopted, and appropriate exceptions are made for the treatment of juveniles, taking into account the characteristics of juveniles who are still developing.

The basic principle in juvenile treatment is to respect the plasticity (flexibility) that preserves the possibility of personal growth because they are minors. This is not denied as an idea even in the juvenile law, which is based on the penal system, but in the juvenile law, which is established as an exception to the penal system, the more serious the crime, the greater the desire to punish the juvenile offender, and the idea of ​​plasticity tends to be pushed aside.

In contrast, in communist juvenile treatment, respect for plasticity is a guiding principle that is implemented without exception. For this reason, the concept of a "juvenile" is not defined formally by the legal age of adulthood, but is determined according to the biological and medical stage of development.

Therefore, for example, a person who has reached the legal age of adulthood but is considered to be a minor in terms of their developmental stage due to a developmental disorder or intellectual disability will be recognized and treated as a "juvenile."

Conversely, a person who is a minor in terms of the law but is judged to be at a developmental stage equivalent to that of an adult - the closer a minor is to the legal age of adulthood, the more likely they are to be recognized as such - will be recognized and treated as an "adult."

With the concept of juveniles thus made flexible, the treatment given to offenders who are recognized as juveniles is of two types: "educational observation" and "transfer to a correctional school."

"Educational observation" is a treatment that could be considered a juvenile version of probation for juveniles with low antisocial tendencies, but it places more emphasis on education than adult probation.

"Transfer to a correctional school" is a type of restrictive treatment aimed at juveniles with strong antisocial tendencies who are difficult to rehabilitate through "educational observation," but unlike adult correctional facilities, it allows for correction to go hand in hand with academics.

Furthermore, juveniles who are referred to custody for specific problematic behavior (delinquency) that does not constitute a serious offence, or juveniles who have committed a minor first offence such as shoplifting, are removed from the juvenile treatment route and sent directly to the appropriate juvenile welfare institution for welfare protection measures.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 6.5.

👉The table of contents so far is here.

Chapter 6: The System of Offences Law

6.5. Various correctional treatment systems -part 2-

As mentioned in the previous article, offenders with severe anti-social tendencies who are in great need of correction are given correctional treatment in a correctional facility. There are various policy possibilities for classifying this correctional treatment, but the more simple the treatment system is and the more consideration it gives to human rights, the better.

In this respect, correctional treatment under communist offences law is different from criminal punishment in that it is not a punishment proportional to the severity of the crime, and therefore the period is not presented in numerical terms from the beginning, such as 1 year, 10 years, etc.

However, from a human rights perspective, it is not appropriate to make all treatment indefinite, so a "renewable term system" in which a predetermined legal period is used as one unit = term, and terms are renewed according to the progress of correction seems to be more appropriate.

Here, a term means one unit of a correctional program with a period set in advance by law. The basic unit of term is divided into three ranks, from type 1 to type 3, depending on the subject's level of correctional need, and the length of each term increases in increments of two years with each rank increase.

For example, the term for the type 1 correctional treatment is one year, the term for the type 2 correctional treatment is three years, and the maximum term for the type 3 correctional treatment is five years. These terms will be renewed in line with progress of correction.

In addition to these subclassifications according to the degree of need for correction, there are also further classifications based on whether psychiatric factors such as mental illness are found to have been the cause of the individual offences.

If, as a result of the assessment, the treatment given when these are not found is called the A treatment, and the treatment given when these are found is called the B treatment, the most detailed classification would be to separate each of the types of correctional treatment listed above into the A and the B treatment.

Assuming that even the renewed maximum correctional treatment does not result in progress to a level where rehabilitation is possible, life custodial confinement, which holds a target for life, marks the limit of correctional treatment, but as this is different from a punishment such as life imprisonment, all corrective efforts are not abandoned, and there is still room for social rehabilitation once correction has progressed.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.