New approaches to the right to be heard in relation to the application of alternatives to administrative sanctions

Abstract

The right to be heard is one of the key instruments that ensure adequate protection of the  participants´ rights during the proceedings before the administrative authority. This requirement is especially important in administrative offences proceedings due to fact that administrative bodies may issue also very serious sanctions and it is important to enable the offenders to influence the outcome of proceedings. Therefore may participants raise their objections, opinions, suggestions. The authors also focus on issues related to the possibility of alternative approaches to administrative sanctions and  related issues concerning ensuring adequate position of offender. These questions have not yet  attracted doctrinal attention. Article analyses the currently accepted new legislation on administrative offences proceeding, with overlaps resulting from the Council of Europe documents and including basic comparison with the processing on administrative offences in Germany and Poland. In addition, to the basic analysis of the new legislation benefits, the authors pay attention to the new instrument of “legal settlement” that allows  administrative authorities to approve  agreement between  offender and  injured party about committed administrative offence and the associated remedy. The new institute is worthy researching, particularly because it is one of the first attempts to adopt alternative approaches to administrative offences proceedings and  brings new challenges for administrative authorities. This new institute is compared with the legislation in Germany and Poland. Also methods of analysis of legal requirements of legal documents of Council of Europe and national legislation, normative analysis, literature review and deduction were used in this connection. Authors reached a rather interesting conclusion that the approaches to ADR in administrative offences proceedings are in all three examined different while the article deals more closely with these differences.