Current trends in forming the personnel reserve of the prosecution service and their influence on the effectiveness of law enforcement

Abstract

Staffing of the prosecution service rests on two separate reserve regimes whose legal foundations emerged at different times and have not been brought into a single model, which produces a mismatch between the procedure for promoting prosecutorial officers to managerial posts and the procedure for filling positions of the federal state civil service within the same bodies. The aim of the study is to reveal the legal nature of this mismatch and to establish through which mechanisms work with the reserve affects the performance of prosecutorial supervision. The formal-legal method, comparative analysis of departmental regulation, historical-legal reconstruction of the institution and the method of legal qualification of the channels through which the reserve influences performance indicators have been applied. It is established that the current regulation separates personnel training (targeted education with a five-year service obligation), the internal promotion reserve and the competitive reserve of civil servants into three unconnected circuits, so that a unified trajectory of professional growth for a prosecutorial officer is not constructed in law. It is shown that the influence of the reserve on effectiveness is realised indirectly: through a shorter period of filling managerial vacancies, through continuity of supervisory methodology and through a lower share of appointments made without prior preparation. Proposals are formulated to fix in the Federal Law on the Prosecution Service a framework norm on a unified personnel reserve and to synchronise the departmental provisions. The absence in the statute of an independent basis for the reserve keeps the institution at the level of order-based regulation, which limits its resilience to organisational change and reduces the predictability of personnel decisions.