A World View of Criminal Justice

Book excerpt: Criminal justice procedure is the bedrock of human rights. Surprisingly, however, in an era of unprecedented change in criminal justice around the world, it is often dismissed as technical and unimportant. This failure to take procedure seriously has a terrible cost, allowing reform to be driven by purely pragmatic considerations, cost-cutting or foreign influence. Current US political domination, for example, has produced a historic and global shift towards more adversarial procedure, which is widely misunderstood and inconsistently implemented. This book addresses such issues by bringing together a huge range of historical and contemporary research on criminal justice in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas. It proposes a theory of procedure derived from the three great international trial modes of 'inquisitorial justice', 'adversarial justice' and 'popular justice'. This approach opens up the possibility of assessing criminal justice from a more objective standpoint, as well as providing a sourcebook for comparative study and practical reform around the world.