ABSTRACT
This chapter presents certain presumptions concerning the prevailing legal procedural traditions in England and Wales and the Netherlands based on the existing literature. It argues that the discrepancies between the normative view of the role of defence lawyers at the investigative stage of the criminal proceedings and the empirical practice of legal assistance at the investigative stage should also be attributed to factors other than the prevailing procedural traditions, and the laws and regulations stemming from such traditions. The adversarial tradition supports the idea of the lawyer being an active participant of the fact-finding process, whilst in the inquisitorial tradition, lawyers are considered ‘outsiders’ who have no legitimate function in the fact-finding. Some sources attributed the reluctance of some European systems of criminal procedure to embrace the right of early access to a lawyer to resistance exerted by procedural traditions or local legal cultures.
