Incorporation of the Negociated Pleas of Guilty in Kosovo Legislation and Its Application in Practice

The Negotiated Plea of Guilty is incorporated in the Kosovo legislation only in the last decade. Given the Kosovo context and the big number of the unsolved court cases, the pleas of guilty are considered to be a good tool to improve the efficiency of the court system. Thus, this paper is focused on describing how plea agreement is covered in the Code of the Criminal Procedure of Kosovo (2013) compared to the Temporary Code of the Criminal Procedure (2004) and how much negociated plea of guilty is applied in the practice. The qualitative research design was employed and the data were collected through document analysis and published statistical data. The findings show that in addition to the the exclusive right attributed the defendant or his defense counsel to initiate the negociated pleas of guilty, the Code of the Criminal Procedure (2013) entitles also the state prosecutor to initiate it. Still, the pleas of guilty are used in a limited number of cases and there is a need for further research to explore the reasons why the negociated plea of guilty is used rarely