I stället för straff : sanktionsavgifter som kriminalpolitiskt medel mot bagatellbrottslighet

Sammanfattning: Administrative penalties have been widely used in Sweden since the beginning of the 1970’s. These penalties were introduced to make some areas of legislation more effective, to free the overburdened criminal justice system of certain petty offences (décriminalisation) and to make it possible to penalise legal entities. From the viewpoint of legal theory, the administrative penalties represent a heterogeneous phenomenon which can not be subsumed under any kind of sanction existing in the Swedish legal system. From the point of view of criminal policy, the present legislation regulating administrative penalties is not fully satisfactory. There is a lack of any coherence behind the regulation. Moreover, the regulation and application of the administrative penalties do not respect some of the leading principles of repressive sanctioning acceptable in a democratic society.The Swedish administrative penalties correspond, at least partially, to the administrative penal law in a number of European legal systems. The main purpose of the creation of this sanction system and its most practical use have been the sanctioning of petty offences outside the criminal law. Even this kind of sanctioning, however, has to follow some basic principles and safeguards expressed, for example, in the European Convention for Protection of Human Rights. From this point of view, the present regulation of administrative penalties in Swedish law should be modified. The same criteria and similar legislative methods as those used in criminal law legislation should, in principle, be followed.