ABSTRACT
The Hunger for Justice Over nine million people are today being held in penal institutions around the world1 and this year nearly four thousand others will be judicially executed.2 Nothing is more striking in criminal justice than the extraordinary variety of ways in which these individuals reached the prison cell or the execution chamber. Some were condemned after public adversarial trials, others by their own confession under torture, others by secret committees or officials acting alone. In some cases the decision was reached by professional lawyers, sitting together or singly, in other cases by lay people, by political, military or religious panels. The diversity of criminal procedure in different parts of the world is simply astonishing. Yet, despite the importance of the undertaking, there appears to be no agreement whatsoever on what constitutes a satisfactory criminal process. What follows is an account of this diversity and the relentless progress of criminal justice reform around the world, which has accelerated dramatically in the last few years. It is an important and sometimes disturbing history. A few years before his death, the distinguished criminologist, Sir Leon Radzinowicz, warned of the scale of the problem of criminal justice. ‘There are at least four billion people in the world at present’, he argued, ‘as hungry for elementary criminal justice as they are for everyday essential commodities’ (1991a, p.428). He noted, despairingly, the inexorable progress towards ‘an authoritarian model of criminal justice’ (ibid., p.425) and went on:
(i)n very many parts of the world, including Europe, the system of criminal justice is amorphous, disjointed and stagnant. ... Often there are pious proclamations of goals to be pursued which are flagrantly contradicted by ugly realities. ... overshadowed by the impact of rising crime, by financial restrictions, and by the pressure to invest limited resources in attempts to alleviate other, more appealing, social problems (ibid., p.428).
