preliminary proceedings
noun · Ermittlungsverfahren
The Ermittlungsverfahren is the investigative stage German procedure begins with, and it is led by the public prosecutor rather than by the police, who act as her investigating officers. It ends in one of three ways, a charge, a discontinuance or an application for a penalty order, and the person investigated is the Beschuldigter, a status that carries rights from the moment it attaches.
Which translation, when
Why
Preliminary proceedings is the usual rendering of the Ermittlungsverfahren, the investigative stage with which German criminal procedure begins and which has no exact counterpart in English practice. Two features shape it. The first is who leads: the Staatsanwaltschaft directs the investigation, the police act as her investigating officers, and the decision what to investigate and how to end the matter lies with her, not with the police, an allocation English readers used to police-led investigation and a separate prosecuting service regularly misjudge. The duties that come with the office, the obligation to gather exonerating as well as incriminating evidence and the principle of mandatory prosecution, are held by the prosecutor entry. The second feature is how the stage ends, and German law offers exactly three routes. The prosecutor brings a charge, and the document and the court stage that follows belong to the indictment entry. Or she discontinues, either because the investigation has not produced sufficient suspicion, which closes the file without any judicial act, or on one of the discretionary grounds that let a case be dropped with or without conditions, the territory of the caution entry. Or she applies for a penalty order in a summary written procedure, which has its own entry here. One further thing a translation must track is the label of the person concerned, because German changes it with the stage: Beschuldigter during the investigation, Angeschuldigter once a charge has been preferred, Angeklagter once the court has admitted it to trial. English says suspect and then defendant, so the German word in a document tells the reader which stage it comes from, and flattening the three into one destroys that signal.
Typical mistakes
- The Ermittlungsverfahren is led by the prosecutor and not by the police, so a translation that treats the police as the deciding authority misdescribes the German allocation.
- The stage ends in a charge, a discontinuance or an application for a penalty order, so presenting prosecution as the only outcome overlooks the routes most files actually take.
- Beschuldigter, Angeschuldigter and Angeklagter mark three different stages, so rendering all of them as defendant loses where the document sits in the procedure.
What matters
Translating German investigation correspondence: the text should name the stage as Ermittlungsverfahren, keep the prosecutor as the directing authority, and use the role word the source uses rather than a single English label.
What the machine misses
A machine rendering of preliminary proceedings gives Vorverfahren or vorläufiges Verfahren, and the stage is the Ermittlungsverfahren, directed by the Staatsanwaltschaft with the police as her investigating officers and ending in a charge, a discontinuance or an application for a penalty order; the loose word also blurs the role labels that mark which stage a document belongs to.
Examples
| preliminary proceedings | das Ermittlungsverfahren |
| the investigation was discontinued | das Verfahren wurde eingestellt |
| the accused person under investigation | der Beschuldigte |
| the public prosecutor preferred charges | die Staatsanwaltschaft erhob Anklage |
More notes on these sections
charge Belastung
prosecutor Staatsanwalt