Special criminal law and inspectorates

Unlike the regular police services, special inspection services in Europe focus on a specific branch of the criminal law. These ´special´ laws were (and still are) subsumed under what is generally indicated with the umbrella term ´special criminal law´. The variety of these laws is enormous, and has expanded greatly in recent decades. Most of the violations of this special criminal law belong to the field of white collar crime: violations of health and safety regulation at work, violations of the environmental criminal law, fiscal criminal law violations, health criminal law violations, and so on. In this chapter we discuss the specificities of the functioning of inspectorates and their historical origin, essentially in Europe. One of these characteristics is the large discretionary power of the inspectorates in comparison to the regular public police agencies.

ISBN:978-0-415-72214-8

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