This book considers the effectiveness and fairness of using international cooperation to obtain confession evidence or evidence of a suspect or accused person’s silence across borders. This is a question of balance in limiting and protecting the right to silence. The functioning of the applicable law in Denmark, England and Wales and Australia is analysed in relation to investigative and trial measures such as police questioning, administrative questioning powers, covert surveillance and the use of silence as evidence of guilt.On the national level, this work examines the way in which domestic rules balance the right to silence in national criminal proceedings, and whether investigative and trial rules produce continuity throughout the criminal proceedings as a whole. From the transnational perspective, comparative legal analysis is used to determine whether the national continuity may be disrupted to such an extent that cooperation in the gathering of confession evidence causes unfairness. From the international perspective, this research compares the right to silence under the ICCPR and the ECHR to identify the overall effect of cooperating under particular human rights frameworks on the question of balance.

This book considers the effectiveness and fairness of using international cooperation to obtain confession evidence or evidence of a suspect or accused person’s silence across borders. This is a question of balance in limiting and protecting the right to silence. The functioning of the applicable law in Denmark, England and Wales and Australia is analysed in relation to investigative and trial measures such as police questioning, administrative questioning powers, covert surveillance and the use of silence as evidence of guilt.On the national level, this work examines the way in which domestic rules balance the right to silence in national criminal proceedings, and whether investigative and trial rules produce continuity throughout the criminal proceedings as a whole. From the transnational perspective, comparative legal analysis is used to determine whether the national continuity may be disrupted to such an extent that cooperation in the gathering of confession evidence causes unfairness. From the international perspective, this research compares the right to silence under the ICCPR and the ECHR to identify the overall effect of cooperating under particular human rights frameworks on the question of balance.

This book provides a comprehensive explanation of what the right to a fair trial means in practice under international law. Focus on factual scenarios that practitioners may, it brings together sources and cases that define the right to a fair trial in criminal proceedings.

Within an international context in which the right to silence has long been regarded as sacrosanct, this book provides the first comprehensive, empirically-based analysis of the effects of curtailing the right to silence. The right to silence has served as the practical expression of the principles that an individual was to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and that it was for the prosecution to establish guilt. In 1791, the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution proclaimed that none ‘shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself’. In more recent times, the privilege against self-incrimination has been a founding principle for the International Criminal Court, the new South African constitution and the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Despite this pedigree, over the past 30 years when governments have felt under pressure to combat crime or terrorism, the right to silence has been reconsidered (as in Australia), curtailed (in most of the United Kingdom) or circumvented (by the creation of the military tribunals to try the Guantánamo detainees). The analysis here focuses upon the effects of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 in England and Wales. There, curtailing the right to silence was advocated in terms of ‘common sense’ policy-making and was achieved by an eclectic borrowing of concepts and policies from other jurisdictions. The implications of curtailing this right are here explored in detail with reference to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but within a comparative context that examines how different ‘types’ of legal systems regard the right to silence and the effects of constitutional protection.

This volume considers the way in which the focus on individual rights may constitute an obstacle to ensuring fairness in criminal proceedings. The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of criminal justice, forcing legal systems with different institutional forms and practices to interact with each other as they attempt to combat crime beyond national borders, has accentuated the need for systems to seek legitimacy beyond their domestic traditions. Fairness, expressed in terms of the right to a fair trial in provisions such as Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, has emerged across Europe as the principal means of guaranteeing the legitimacy of criminal proceedings. The consequence of this is that criminal procedure doctrines are framed overwhelmingly in 'constitutional' terms – the protection of defence rights is necessary to restrict and legitimate the state's mandate to prosecute crime. Yet there are various problems with relying solely or predominantly on defence rights as a means of ensuring that proceedings are 'fair' or legitimate and these issues are rarely discussed in the academic literature. In this volume, scholars from the disciplines of law, philosophy and sociology challenge various normative assumptions underpinning our understanding of fairness in criminal proceedings.

An examination of international attempts to develop common principles for regulating criminal evidence across different legal traditions.

​This book proposes and outlines a comprehensive framework for judicial protection in transnational criminal proceedings that ensures the right to judicial review without hampering the effective functioning of international cooperation in criminal matters. It examines a broad range of potential approaches in the context of selected national criminal justice systems, and offers a comparative analysis of EU Member States and non-Member States alike. The book particularly focuses on the differences between cooperation within the EU on the one hand and cooperation with third states on the other, and on the consequences of this distinction for the scope of judicial review.