Investigating and Prosecuting Organised Crime in Great Britain

Organised crime is one of the most serious menaces for the contemporary society. This is why talking about organised crime and the criminal justice methods to defeat it is a crucial and living matter to understand our world.
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The United Kingdom of Great Britain is one of those countries that rejected the offence of membership in an organised crime group. In so doing the UK has suffered a split between criminal law and criminal justice. On one side, criminal law still does not recognise the convenience of a crime of belonging and struggles providing different penalties for different offences, lacking a strong and unified approach to the matter. Nevertheless, on the other side, in the recent years, the British Government has pursued a vigorous enhancement of the procedural tools available in fighting organised crime.
The terrorist attack in London on the 7th July 2005 has shaken the whole population and provoked a tough reaction from the Parliament and the entire political class. While a huge amount of resources have been allocated to prevent, detect and disrupt terrorism, it has been considered that terrorism could be better handled by itself and, therefore, all other crimes involving some degree of organisation should have been pushed aside from terrorism.
The Government thought that creating a specific agency with a specific mandate and specific rules of procedure to investigate and dismantle organised crime groups could have been the winning card.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has been established on the 1st April 2006, by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 and is the acme of a profound reform that has reshaped the criminal justice system and in particular the investigation and prosecution stages.
This research paper aims to demonstrate - through the analysis of the reforms occurred and mostly through the full understanding of what SOCA is and what it does – that substantial criminal law and procedural criminal justice in today’s Britain are indeed unbalanced and on different levels. The absence of a single offence in criminal law is, in fact, influencing the accessible outcomes in the criminal procedure, which, indeed, is almost fully equipped to guarantee more valid results than those achieved until now.